Ed Feingersh/Michael Ochs Archives " Getty Images
Marilyn Monroe in 1955.
In 1972, upon the 10th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death, Gloria Steinem wrote an essay for Ms. magazine titled "The Woman Who Died Too Soon." As the teenager, Steinem had relished the celluloid darkness of the matinee: the sci-fi flicks, the serials, the realistic charm of Doris Day. She desired them all, however improbable the plots or poor the acting. But she walked out of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." The sight of Marilyn as the diamond-obsessed showgirl Lorelei Lee, "huge as the colossus doll, mincing as well as whispering as well as simply anticipating her way into sum vulnerability," barbarous her.
MARILYN
The Passion as well as the Paradox
By Lois Banner
Illustrated. 515 pp. Bloomsbury. $ 30.
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Times Topic: Marilyn Monroe
Lorelei's doe-eyed desire for capitulation felt dangerous to Steinem an affirmation of the power of the masculine gaze. But she would come to see, in the star's own sadness, in her winking innocence as well as complex sexuality, the woman straddling the puritanism of postwar America as well as the dissolution in the '60s. Marilyn died, during 36, upon the night before of the publication of "The Feminine Mystique" as well as the rise of second-wave feminism. What if she had lived? Who would she who could she have become? "When the past dies there is mourning," Steinem later wrote, "but when the destiny dies, the imaginations have been compelled to carry it on."
It has been 50 years to the day given Marilyn died. There have been countl! ess biog raphies, novels, plays (including Arthur Miller's "After the Fall," with the unusual caricature), conspiracy-oriented chronicles of her final days, as well as her own ghostwritten autobiography, published posthumously. There have been almost as many versions of Marilyn: she was brazenly sexual, bashful as well as insecure, the dumb blonde as well as the bookworm who read Dostoyevsky; she was peaceful as well as free-spirited, critical as well as cannily controlling; she could barely act, vamping for the camera, or she was the brilliant comedian, playing the pinup version of Shakespeare's fool.
Nobody is one thing all the time. Yet Marilyn is steeped in paradoxes so profound that, even underneath the microscope, they stir as well as shift but ever settling into the singular picture. Such is the premise of Lois Banner's brand new biography, "Marilyn: The Passion as well as the Paradox," which behaves the small similar to the subject. Weaving together disdainful interviews, material from prior books and, many significantly, the contents of Monroe's two long-lost personal filing cabinets (made available to the open usually last year, when Banner published the preference from them in "MM Personal"), Banner presents the rich as well as often imaginative narrative of Marilyn's life. By the end, Monroe feels during once similar to an earthly being an almost-friend as well as an enigma, still somewhat out of focus as well as only beyond reach. That seems right.
Banner is less interested in definitively collapsing the poles than in fooling around out the contradictions as well as underlying motives of the complex character. She takes us through Marilyn's winding childhood to her breakthrough in Hollywood as well as her storybook marriage to Joe DiMaggio, to her escape to Miller as well as behaving classes in New York, to her short as well as ultimately tragic lapse to Hollywood. Unsurprisingly, sex suffuses it all. Banner traces an endless tide of affairs Marilyn fit promiscuity with the self-a! ssurance which sex was "an action which brought friends closer together" together with several with women as well as those with Bobby as well as Jack Kennedy, her many dangerous liaisons. The Kennedys reappear in the final chapters, probably if murkily concerned in the cover of the events surrounding her death, from an strong overdose of sleeping pills.
Banner occasionally takes sides, concentrating instead upon the "geography of gender" which shaped Marilyn's early development, her successive relationships as well as the changeable bombshell she would become. Tellingly, the initial territory of the book is the longest, detailing her childhood in eleven foster homes. Her mother, Gladys, was the movie cutter for the Hollywood college of music as well as vital alone when she gave birth to Marilyn, who never knew her father. Gladys drifted in as well as out of her hold up as well as eventually grown serious psychological problems, the fate Marilyn feared she would repeat. Meanwhile, she was intimately abused by men in several of her foster families. Banner credits her with divulgence the abuse later in life, as well as she sees it as the formative precursor of Marilyn's haphazard sexuality as an adult: "We now know which such abuse can produce lesbianism, sex addiction, exhibitionism as well as an angry, fearful adult." If this is the strange formulation, it is still not too far off. Marilyn had dreams of Boschian witches as well as demons from childhood onward, as well as the repeated prophesy of striding similar to Steinem's colossus over the flat row of church congregants who peered up her skirt. The "passion" of the book's subtitle is the double entendre, an additional paradox: as most the nod to early episodes of eremite repression, as well as later suffering, as it is an expression of joy.
Like Steinem, Banner, the professor of history as well as gender studies during the University of Southern California, dismissed Marilyn as the sex object during first. But she found herself drawn to her ! over the years, struck by their similar upbringings. They both grew up nearby Los Angeles, both in fundamentalist Christian families, both blond as well as blue-eyed as well as curvaceous. Banner began to wonder if Marilyn was not the harbinger of '60s feminism, as strong as she was weak, empowered by her sexuality if small else. In an afterword, she envisions an alternate arena in the career of an additional sexpot, who played Marilyn in "After the Fall." The actress, Barbara Loden, left Hollywood to write feminist screenplays, sauce similar to her masculine counterparts in "trousers, leather jackets as well as boots." Marilyn, wearying of her sex-symbol status, competence have done the same. Or she competence not have: "In the box of Marilyn, people hold what they wish to believe." And paradox, it seems, makes for the very long afterlife.
Zo Slutzky has created for Bookforum, The Los Angeles Times as well as Mother Jones.
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