Why, 54 years after her death, is Marilyn Monroe still with us? Why does this voluptuous pin up blonde, an icon of sexual desire in a sexually repressed era still mean so much?
it was once possible to argue that she signified everything we found alluring about fame and celebrity and once this may have been true, but no longer. In an era where fame is as mass produced and as ubiquitous as any other commodity, the concept of fame means significantly less, if it means anything at all. Marilyn Monroe’s blonde hair and smile might be interpreted in many ways, but the main, defining feature of her life, story and legacy is one of tragedy.
We all know that she died before her time but the real tragedy was not how she died but how she lived. She was an abandoned child, being raised in a series of foster homes after being born to a mother, Gladys Monroe, who too had suffered multiple abandonments throughout her life. Her birth certificate read Norma Jean Mortenson but she never knew who her father was.
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argued that all people are born with a sense of ‘lack’, the process of leaving the womb, he believed, led to the need for a sense of completion. He believed that all human relationships were part of the quest for completion and in the case of Marilyn Monroe the lack or sense of loss was not only experienced in the way Lacan suggested, but in absolute abandonment as a vulnerable child. The quest to be loved, understood and valued for who she was would dominate the rest of her life and lead to her untimely death.
She was sent at the age of eight to live with one of her mother’s friends and was sexually abused by the lodger, learning once again that when adults didn’t abandon her, they tricked, lied, manipulated and hurt. She married when she was sixteen to her neighbour’s son a match she said that ‘killed her with boredom’ and that was short-lived. What else would an abandoned child, desperate to be loved do than marry the first person she could find as soon as she could?
Depending on your point of view, fame either saved or slowly destroyed her; it could be argued that it did both. She was discovered during the Second World War in a munitions factory by a photographer sent to shoot a patriotic film about women workers and became a model for him and her film career developed throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the repressed conservatism of post war America, her image as a sexualised blonde calendar girl came became a code for the ideas about sex and sexuality America was unable to utter.
As discussion of any kind of sex other than that which existed in the nuclear family was hidden and repressed, it became part of a national obsession in America. During the 1940s and 1950s the sexologist Alfred Kinsey published a sensational survey into the nation’s sexual habits, revealing that infidelity, homosexuality and masturbation were all quite normal and everyday phenomena.
This was the context within which Marilyn Monroe’s fame grew, and if she had been a ‘dumb blonde’ it might have made life easier for her, but the woman who could only find adoration as a pinup was polymathic in her intelligence. She read Dostoevsky, Joyce and was fascinated by mathematics and Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The more she craved acceptance and intimacy, the more she realised that no one wanted to know Norma Jean Mortenson, the often shy, vulnerable damaged child with a fascinating inner life and a mind that needed stimulation.
Instead, the ‘love’ she received from her audiences was reserved for Marilyn, or ‘her’ as she sometimes called the act or performance that slowly became her whole life. Part of the performance that she was lost in, however, was that of the victim and she could be an extremely manipulative and emotionally damaging person to be around. The only way she could eventually survive the loneliness and desperation of her life, the longing to be authentic and to be loved for being who she was (something always denied her), was to medicate the pain in a haze of drugs, alcohol and codependent behaviours.
She found enablers, including her psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson, who invited her into his family home to see what normal life looked like and who allowed her to call him in the middle of the night, sobbing and intoxicated. Shortly before she died, he realised that he had failed to help her find some kind of stability and realised that the end was close, it was in a way, the only solution left.
Marilyn Monroe is just one of countless hurting children, one whose adult life was written in childhood, who was unable to resolve the crises posed by abandonment and who sought the answers outside of herself. She appeared to find solutions but really they were the seeds of her doom.
The answers always lie within for every addict, everything we chase after is merely the illness in altered form.
Nick Shepley