Windy City Monroe sculpture reveals all
Source: Agencies |
July 17, 2011, Sunday
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AS dozens of people watched, an 8-meter-tall sculpture of Marylin Monroe in her famous pose from the film "The Seven Year Itch" was unveiled on Chicago's Magnificent Mile on Friday. In the film, a draft catches Monroe's dress as she passes over a subway grate.
Many in the crowd that descended on the plaza throughout the day wasted little time positioning themselves under the movie star's dress to catch a subway-level view and take pictures with their cell phone cameras. Not that Monroe, her eyes closed and a sublime smile on her face, seemed to notice.
Some of those who took pictures of the sculpture called "Forever Marilyn" were surprised when they came around the side and back of the sculpture and saw honest-to-goodness lace panties on the movie icon. The film scene and photographs taken from it left much more to the imagination than artist Seward Johnson's sculpture.
"I would have expected to see something flat there, and we wouldn't see her undergarments," said Trisha Feely, 41, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Naperville. "It's a little intrusive."
"It reveals what everybody was always thinking," said her husband, Terry Feely, 42.
The actual white dress worn by Monroe in the scene from director Billy Wilder's 1955 film sold for US$4.6 million at an auction last month of Hollywood costumes and props collected by film star Debbie Reynolds.
Chicago has a history of public art displays, including a herd of fiberglass cows that lined Michigan Avenue some years back. The plaza where Monroe will be stationed until next spring was the home a few years ago to another Johnson sculpture: the equally iconic, though far less glamorous, farmer and his spinster daughter from Grant Wood's "American Gothic."
"Thank God, she has panties," said Wanda Taylor, voicing the relief of a mother who wouldn't have to spend the next several hours answering questions from her nine-year-old son, Kendall Sculfield. "They're clean and white, so I'm happy."
Monroe's ex-husband, baseball star Joe DiMaggio, was reported to have been upset during the filming of the scene in 1954, and the couple divorced a few months later.
But 52-year-old Pam Jennelle, of Orlando, Florida, couldn't understand how anyone could be offended or uncomfortable with the sculpture.
"They're perfectly proper white lace panties," she said.
Besides, she said, the sculpture, particularly the look on Monroe's face, captured the magic that people still feel a half century after the movie star's death.
"She's beautiful," she said. "How can you not love Marilyn Monroe?"
Many in the crowd that descended on the plaza throughout the day wasted little time positioning themselves under the movie star's dress to catch a subway-level view and take pictures with their cell phone cameras. Not that Monroe, her eyes closed and a sublime smile on her face, seemed to notice.
Some of those who took pictures of the sculpture called "Forever Marilyn" were surprised when they came around the side and back of the sculpture and saw honest-to-goodness lace panties on the movie icon. The film scene and photographs taken from it left much more to the imagination than artist Seward Johnson's sculpture.
"I would have expected to see something flat there, and we wouldn't see her undergarments," said Trisha Feely, 41, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Naperville. "It's a little intrusive."
"It reveals what everybody was always thinking," said her husband, Terry Feely, 42.
The actual white dress worn by Monroe in the scene from director Billy Wilder's 1955 film sold for US$4.6 million at an auction last month of Hollywood costumes and props collected by film star Debbie Reynolds.
Chicago has a history of public art displays, including a herd of fiberglass cows that lined Michigan Avenue some years back. The plaza where Monroe will be stationed until next spring was the home a few years ago to another Johnson sculpture: the equally iconic, though far less glamorous, farmer and his spinster daughter from Grant Wood's "American Gothic."
"Thank God, she has panties," said Wanda Taylor, voicing the relief of a mother who wouldn't have to spend the next several hours answering questions from her nine-year-old son, Kendall Sculfield. "They're clean and white, so I'm happy."
Monroe's ex-husband, baseball star Joe DiMaggio, was reported to have been upset during the filming of the scene in 1954, and the couple divorced a few months later.
But 52-year-old Pam Jennelle, of Orlando, Florida, couldn't understand how anyone could be offended or uncomfortable with the sculpture.
"They're perfectly proper white lace panties," she said.
Besides, she said, the sculpture, particularly the look on Monroe's face, captured the magic that people still feel a half century after the movie star's death.
"She's beautiful," she said. "How can you not love Marilyn Monroe?"
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