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Marilyn Monroe and the invention of
'sex'
On 5 August 1962,
at her home in Brentwood, Los Angeles, Norma Jeane
Mortenson was found dead. The autopsy revealed
barbiturate poisoning and an apparent suicide.
Fifty years on, we are still trying to figure out
why this woman who invented the contemporary
concept of "sex" took her own life. By KEVIN
BLOOM.
Beyond feminism and gender
equality and the political correctness that we in
South Africa are as adept at exhibiting as any
other country with a flawless Constitution, there
lies a truth
so self-evident that we no longer
need to hold it up for scrutiny: sex sells. In
fact, given how self-evident this truth now is, we
should probably narrow it down to focus on a woman
who died 50 years ago, and coin a more precise
platitude: sex endures. Then again, seeing as
we're talking here about Marilyn Monroe, why not
go all the way? Sex is truth.
Question is:
what's sex?
For millions of people
worldwide, sex is not the necessary human function
that bodily entwines a woman and a man in the
service of procreation - as per the education
manuals of a more chaste age, that is "sexual
intercourse". Neither is sex the act that takes
place between a woman and a man (or a woman and a
woman, or a man and a man, or any combination of
the aforesaid in multiplied groupings) when
procreation isn't the aim - depending on the mood
and the lighting, the correct nomenclature on this
score runs the gamut from "making love" to
"fucking". Likewise, sex isn't pornography, it
isn't masturbation, and it certainly isn't a
shopping spree (even if the latter is the endpoint
of its f๊ted selling power).
Norman
Mailer, who never met Marilyn but who sat behind
her once at Actor's Studio, wrote three books
about the screen goddess, the biggest-selling
being Marilyn: A Biography (1973), and the most
interesting being Of Women and Their Elegance
(1980), wherein he tried to insinuate himself into
the mind of his subject, and thereby approach the
riddle of her limitless sex appeal. Set up as a
faux-memoir in the voice of Marilyn herself,
Mailer imagined the following about the immortal
scene:
"Now I guess the studio had given
me a white shmatte that night and tight white
panties, and my hair had a hundred marcelled
waves, and I certainly had no neck and lots of
back and shoulders, where I was pleasantly plump,
to say the least, but I paid no attention. I threw
caution to the winds, which is one clich้ I could
die saying and hold it in my arms, I can't help
it, give me a ton of caution to throw to the
winds. There were 2,000 people on the street,
watching, and they had a million whistles."
Mailer went further with his set piece,
suggesting that Marilyn wanted to "immortalise
immortality" by removing her panties and throwing
them at the crowd. In an article for New York
magazine, the author pre-empted the expected
onslaught of indignation by staging a mock trial -
during cross-examination, he had himself tell the
prosecution that he came to such a conclusion
after poring for "several years" over photographs
of Marilyn taken by Milton Greene, and that rather
than malign the actress, he'd intended to paint
her as "charming" and humorous".
Needless
to say, Mailer's clever trick didn't stop the
scandalised public from clawing at him anyway. Yet
to look at Greene's photos today is to agree with
Mailer on at least one aspect of his defence:
Marilyn was without a doubt a charming and
humorous woman. As for the author's attempt to
shed some light on the source of her sexiness, he
didn't come within a million miles of the
photographer he presumed to reference.
And
maybe that's just it - maybe "sexy" is not a term
that can ever be adequately rendered in prose?
After all, to re-watch The Seven Year Itch (1955)
or Some Like it Hot (1959) is to know something
about the human condition - for instance, the
truth that we are all at our core sexual beings -
that only the image can capture. Of course, maybe
a writer with less of a reputation as a chauvinist
than Norman Mailer would do a little better?
Enter Maureen Dowd, who on the occasion of
the 50th anniversary of Marilyn's death put this
paragraph into her New York Times column:
"Wherever I travel in the world, I run across the
luminous image of the heart-breaking and
breath-taking sex symbol who was smart enough to
become the most famous 'dumb blonde' of the 20th
century. Marilyn, her white pleated halter dress
flying up over the New York subway grate, is as
deeply etched in the global imagination as Audrey
Hepburn in a black Givenchy dress at Tiffany's."
Doesn't quite cut it either, does it?
Still, Dowd did two things in her column on the
weekend that moves us a little closer. First, she
quoted her newspaper's former managing editor who
once gaped at Marilyn's walk, saying of it that
"it was as though she had a hundred body parts
that moved separately in different directions" and
that "you didn't know what body part to follow."
Second, she employed the adjective "luminous,"
which Jacqueline Rose, an infinitely more serious
writer, had used and deconstructed with respect to
Marilyn in the pages of the London Review of Books
in April.
A trained and acclaimed
psychoanalyst, Rose was interested in what
Marilyn's luminosity implied. She deftly peppered
her essay with descriptive synonyms like "aura",
"glowed" and "lighting up" to show that Norma Jean
was inimitable; ultimately incomparable to the
"matt" beauties of the silver screen who were cast
by audiences in the same category: Marlene
Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor. Rose was
suggesting, obviously, that Marilyn's beauty was
more "dazzling" than it was classic. But what, she
wanted to know, were men seeing when they were
blinded by her on-screen presence?
In a
phrase, wrote Rose, they were - and still are -
seeing the "illusion of desire". For the writer,
the best example of this was in There's No
Business Like Show Business (1954), and
specifically Marilyn's rendition of Isaiah
Berlin's "After You Get What You Want," wherein
she sings, "After you get what you want you don't
want it." It was a number that, as far as Rose was
concerned, prefigured the sex symbol's death.
As she noted: "Monroe herself was explicit
about the ruthless sexual exploitation that
accompanied her early days in Hollywood. In fact,
we don't need the abuse to pick up the deep
discomfort behind Hollywood's sexual glorification
of Monroe, which she both hated and played to.
Innocence and naturalness, the two qualities most
commonly ascribed to her - I lose count of the
number of times - should make us suspicious.
Together they offer an image of sex without
complexity, depth or pain, something that hovers
above the human - which is why it is such a tease
and also why, as others have pointed out, her
image seems to have such an intimate proximity
with death."
Mailer could never have
written something like that, mainly because for
him sex was far more "life" than it was "death" -
as a man who was married six times and fathered
nine children, he was unapologetically proud of
his own vitality and sexiness (which he saw as one
and the same thing). But we should also remember
that countless critics have credited Mailer as the
writer who, more than any other, explained and
delineated the modern concept of "celebrity".
Meaning, he was as ill-equipped to
perceive the tragedy in Marilyn's short life as he
was to perceive it in that old (yet still
contemporary) advertising phrase: "sex sells". DM
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