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| ESSAY: BLONDE AMBITION | |
 June 2, 2000 
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ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: This is the picture that did it, the one that convinced writer Joyce Carol Oates to take her turn with Marilyn Monroe, goading her into writing "Blonde," the 700-plus page biographical novel of the iconic baby doll bombshell of the last half of the last century. It's astonishing the grip she continues to have, not just in pop culture land, but even on the minds of serious writers. A brief scan of amazon.com shows some 139 Marilyn books-- fiction, non-fiction, tell-alls, coffee table encyclopedias. Ideologues, male and female, have dissected her allure, her tragic early death at age 36. We've got Norman Mailer cooing about her as "the sweet angel of sex," while Gloria Steinem sees her as the ultimate cautionary feminist tale, the ultimate victim needful of our protection. In short, in death Marilyn is still malleable, all things to all people, the screen on which to project one's own fantasies and theories. Object as subject; subject as object. It's now the turn of Joyce Carol Oates to have at the woman and the legend, rather the woman, the beneath the legend and the girl she once was. The girl in this picture, just your average, all-American, pretty, open-faced, what's-the- world-got-in-store-for-me? High school coed, circa 1940. Of course, by 1940 there already was a history, a mother who'd cracked up and been institutionalized, a couple of years in a children's home, an unknown father, fault lines on which, with plenty of lusty male help, Marilyn was able to construct a second, pseudo self, a curvaceous, cooing, yummy thing that no one could or would want to resist. Joyce Carol Oates gets at it all: All the men and the marriages, to DiMaggio and Miller, all the pills and loneliness, the short, messy life of the uber bimbo. For a companion piece, just look at the pictures, the hundreds of them taken over Monroe's lifetime. Play them forward and you can see the history, the ultimate visual autobiography, the cherubic-faced school girl turned wartime pinup turned movie star, her pleated white skirt blowing up around her thighs, encased, at last, in a beaded glove of a gown cooing happy birthday to the young, handsome 35th President of the United States, an encapsulated caricature of herself, of her image. MARILY MONROE: I learned an awful lot in little rock... ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: Along the way, in movies like "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" or "Some Like it Hot," she had deftly spoofed that image. But by the end, near the end, the act was all, and it was unnerving, too much need showing underneath it like the hem of a slip beneath a dress. Child as woman; woman as child. MARILYN MONROE: How did you find me way back in the dark? ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: So what do we make of it, of her, and why do we keep trying? Because there is something so plaintive in her eyes, beneath the cheesecake, something so hopeful and wistful, and not unbrainy. She was trapped in our admiration, skewered like a butterfly by the lens of our longing. Marilyn was the harbinger of the world we now live in where image is all. And the truth is, women are drawn to her as much as men, probably even more so -- and not just out of protective instinct, but also out of a gut- level longing to experience oneself, just one such voluptuously unself-camera- conscious a moment. It might seem politically incorrect to admit that, but one need only look at the nymphets in training in the malls of America. So even though she feels like a bit of a relic in these post- feminist times when the new Madonnas are firmly in charge of their own images and careers, Monroe has this mythopoetic staying power, her story does, as Oates' tome proves. Read it for reliable heartbreak and to see a writer working right at the tip-top of her talent. Then play the pictures backwards and find again, beneath the pancake makeup and the peroxide, the sweet-faced, hopeful, dark- haired girl at the bottom of the myth. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming. |
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