The many Marilyns of the past, present and future
By Zoe Slutzky |
August 5, 2012, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
IT has been 50 years since Marilyn died. There have been countless biographies, novels, plays, conspiracy-oriented chronicles of her final days and her own ghostwritten autobiography, published posthumously. There have been almost as many versions of Marilyn: she was brazenly sexual, shy and insecure, a dumb blonde and a bookworm who read Dostoyevsky; she was gentle and free-spirited, spiteful and cannily controlling; she could barely act, vamping for the camera, or she was a brilliant comedian, playing a pinup version of Shakespeare's fool.
Nobody is one thing all the time. Yet Marilyn is steeped in paradoxes so profound that, even under the microscope, they stir and shift without ever settling into a singular picture. Such is the premise of Lois Banner's new biography, "Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox," which behaves a little like its subject. Weaving together exclusive interviews, material from previous books and, most significantly, the contents of Monroe's two long-lost personal filing cabinets (made available to the public only last year, when Banner published a selection from them in "MM - Personal"), Banner presents a rich, imaginative narrative of Marilyn's life. By the end, Monroe feels at once like an earthly being - an almost-friend - and an enigma, still slightly out of focus and just beyond reach. That seems right.
Banner teases out the contradictions and motives of a complex character. She takes us through Marilyn's nomadic childhood to her breakthrough in Hollywood and her storybook marriage to Joe DiMaggio, to her escape to Arthur Miller and acting classes in New York, to her brief and ultimately tragic return to Hollywood. Sex suffuses it all. Banner traces an endless stream of affairs - Marilyn justified promiscuity with the conviction that sex was "an act that brought friends closer together" - including several with women and those with Bobby and Jack Kennedy.
The author seldom takes sides, concentrating instead on the "geography of gender" that shaped Marilyn. Tellingly, the first section of the book is the longest, detailing her often traumatic childhood in 11 foster homes.
Banner, a professor of history and gender studies at the University of Southern California, dismissed Marilyn as a sex object at first. But she found herself drawn to her over the years, and Banner began to wonder if Marilyn was not a harbinger of 1960s feminism, as strong as she was weak, empowered by her sexuality.
In an afterword, Banner envisions an alternate trajectory in the career of another sexpot Barbara Loden, who played Marilyn in Miller's "After the Fall," but left Hollywood to write feminist screenplays. Marilyn, wearying of her sex-symbol status, might have done the same.
Or she might not have: "In the case of Marilyn, people believe what they want to believe." And paradox, it seems, makes for a very long afterlife.
Nobody is one thing all the time. Yet Marilyn is steeped in paradoxes so profound that, even under the microscope, they stir and shift without ever settling into a singular picture. Such is the premise of Lois Banner's new biography, "Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox," which behaves a little like its subject. Weaving together exclusive interviews, material from previous books and, most significantly, the contents of Monroe's two long-lost personal filing cabinets (made available to the public only last year, when Banner published a selection from them in "MM - Personal"), Banner presents a rich, imaginative narrative of Marilyn's life. By the end, Monroe feels at once like an earthly being - an almost-friend - and an enigma, still slightly out of focus and just beyond reach. That seems right.
Banner teases out the contradictions and motives of a complex character. She takes us through Marilyn's nomadic childhood to her breakthrough in Hollywood and her storybook marriage to Joe DiMaggio, to her escape to Arthur Miller and acting classes in New York, to her brief and ultimately tragic return to Hollywood. Sex suffuses it all. Banner traces an endless stream of affairs - Marilyn justified promiscuity with the conviction that sex was "an act that brought friends closer together" - including several with women and those with Bobby and Jack Kennedy.
The author seldom takes sides, concentrating instead on the "geography of gender" that shaped Marilyn. Tellingly, the first section of the book is the longest, detailing her often traumatic childhood in 11 foster homes.
Banner, a professor of history and gender studies at the University of Southern California, dismissed Marilyn as a sex object at first. But she found herself drawn to her over the years, and Banner began to wonder if Marilyn was not a harbinger of 1960s feminism, as strong as she was weak, empowered by her sexuality.
In an afterword, Banner envisions an alternate trajectory in the career of another sexpot Barbara Loden, who played Marilyn in Miller's "After the Fall," but left Hollywood to write feminist screenplays. Marilyn, wearying of her sex-symbol status, might have done the same.
Or she might not have: "In the case of Marilyn, people believe what they want to believe." And paradox, it seems, makes for a very long afterlife.
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