::: Marilyn Forever :::

Marilyn Monroe

Forty years ago, on August 5, Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her house at Bretwood, a borough of Los Angeles. Next to her, an empty bottle of “Nembutal” and the phone still in her hand. A lot, or too much, was written on this death, and on the particular circumstances surrounding it. No hypothesis whether Marilyn had died or killed herself, not even the most absurd and ridiculous, were left unexplored regarding its reason and happenings. The only undeniable fact was the shocking impact that her death arose everywhere and among everyone. What was said then and later on the tragic event was only an easy legitimation, as Vittorio Sermonti wisely said later, of a “childish and foolish fairy tale”.

Now, forty years later, the most sincere and loyal homage that can be made to this so-called sex symbol, to this militant erotic bomb, to this vamp – that never vampirized anyone but that was actually dissipated by everyone who distractedly or cynically entered her life – is to relive with naivety and ironical winking the sequences of her old films, perhaps not the best ones, but still symptomatic of a joyful and disenchanted philosophy on the human soul. Among them, a film of ’56, Bus Stop, based on the William Inge comedy and wisely directed by Joshua Logan – a film that, in spite of its limited greatness, revealed not only the ingenuity (true or fake, whatever) of a certain American province but most of all of Marilyn Monroe’s flexible and fervid expressiveness, who mimes herself or imitates the stereotyped exterior image that lazy spectators and confident exegetes wanted to obstinately assign her.

To see Marilyn on the screen today means, as an urgent need of reaction, to reconsider the past with a certain regret, between guilty distraction and hagiographical dissipating indulgence. “A piteous, little clown” is the exemplar definition of the fake self-assured Chérie of Bus Stop, played by a caricature of Marilyn who suddenly gives the film a tragic dimension. There’s a lot of laughs but often at the limit of atrocity. In Bus Stop the clumsy e brutal cowboy and the sexy and flaky gal face confrontation in a “war between sexes” that often slips into a pathetic farce in order to silent the authentic lacerations of the persistent taboos of the American puritan sex-phobia. And the artificial “happy ending” of the film doesn’t at all confirm the best solution of a probable drama, since it evidently mocks the conventional mystification of an improbable happy ending.

Yes, naturally, even for Marilyn Monroe, after the outrage of childhood, the poverty of adolescence in the most devastating dreariness, there were (relatively) prosperous and gratifying days and times, like the encounter and short marriage with Joe Di Maggio, or the films that crowned her success – from Niagara, to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year Itch to the brilliant Some Like it Hot. These were actually a few steps of an apparently free-of-obstacle career, although naturally things weren’t exactly like they seemed. Marilyn Monroe, who suffered of congenital insecurity and uncured fears, nurtured a “difficulty of living” destined to make her reach self-destructive shores prematurely. And what’s worse, is that she knew it, presenting through flashing illuminations the sour destiny that was reserved for her: “I’d like to become a great actress, a real actress, and be happy in the most perfect world possible. But who is happy? … Generally, like now, I’m not a happy person at all. Usually I’m as sad as a lost dog…”

The last decisive experiences in the restless and unsatisfied existence of Marilyn Monroe are undeniably rooted and come together in the following important encounter with playwright Arthur Miller, in their short marriage, and then in her usual practice of spending time in New York, with Lee Strsberg, at his renowned Actor’s Studio.

But crucial, and determinant, in the professional and human parabola of this great personality was certainly the difficult and exhausting production of John Huston’s The Misfits (1961) based on an original screenplay by Arthur Miller, that ended up being for the main characters – Marilyn Monroe, Clarke Gable, and Montgomery Clift – an unpredictable “kiss of death” even beyond the intense, memorable aura of epochal disaster and inevitable reckoning that the film itself prospected as a threatening apologue of the end of an era and of the fabulous and legendary factory of Hollywood illusions.

The epitaphs following Marilyn’s death were endless and often incorrect. But Marilyn – an actress and woman constantly and pitilessly marked by vulgar exploitations and horrible outrages – still survives today in her congenital innocence and prodigal availability, most of all as an unrepeatable emblem of a suffered female condition called to play a role in an interrupted trial, in a non-deferrable challenge against prejudices and against closures typical of the Manichean intolerance in search of consolidated realities.

Marilyn Monroe, although for natural intuition and free from any rational filter, knew and understood all this. Especially when she confessed more to herself than to her interlocutors “…I like people very much, at least I think so, since I have some doubts on my sociability… Perhaps this is the drama of my existence but perhaps I have this is common with other people. We like to remain lonely and at the same time we like company. It’s a real conflict that sometimes made me take reckless steps in life.”

In memory and indemnity of mourned Marilyn Monroe, forty years after her death, easy and abused mythicization or fetishistic idealization of a character and figure that is more real and tragic than what thoughtlessly and banally was excepted aren’t legitimate today anymore… So enough with the “irresistible sex symbol”, “erotic bomb”, “exaggerated platinum blonde vamp”… enough. Only her admirers, intelligent, it must be said, deeply understood, from the very beginning, what she was and what she wanted to be, the defenceless yet generous and intrepid Marilyn Monroe. Some even said, with striking analytical wisdom, “As an actress she seemed to have the vocation for comedies, as a woman most certainly the vocation for unhappiness. Even for this, her death saddens us: rarely an unhappy person is mediocre.”

Words of solidarity and extremely civil piety, that echo coherently the poetically overwhelming verses of Pasolini, who lamented Marilyn Monroe like this: “Of the ancient world and the new one / only beauty was left, and you / poor young sister / who ran after elder brothers / and laughed and cried with them, to imitate them / you, young sister / wore this beauty in humbleness / and your soul, the child of modest people / never knew it was wearing it / because it would not have been beauty otherwise /…/ Such beauty, survived from the ancient world, requested by the future world, and possessed by the present world, became your mortal mischief.” Yes, this is what Marilyn Monroe’s adventure was. A short unhappy life.