Marilyn Monroe at 100: celebrating a misunderstood Hollywood icon
100 years ago today, Norma Jeane Mortenson was born on a sunny day in Los Angeles. Just 36 years later – and only 20 miles away from where she’d entered the world – she’d be found dead in her home, having overdosed on barbiturates.
In between then, Mortenson would become Marilyn Monroe, her star power ascending that of ‘Hollywood actor’, and instead becoming a cultural icon, so recognisable that a sparsely-drawn silhouette of her face is enough to identify her. A century on, and her legacy hasn’t faded, and that’s testament to just how captivating she was; it’s impossible to watch Monroe and not be enamoured. She had a special quality that’s only really discovered once in a blue moon.
Sadly, though, so much of Monroe’s legacy is wrapped up in the hardships of her life. The suffering, the abuse, and ultimately her premature death have all contributed to this unique vision we have of the star – one that stands as the ultimate embodiment of how the glamour of Hollywood almost always warps into tragedy.
The difficulties she faced at the hands of men, her miscarriage, and her reliance on drugs all form the bulk of Andrew Dominik’s controversial 2022 biopic Blonde, and while the film claims to be a fictionalised account of Monroe’s life, it has only served to further perpetuate the vision of Monroe as a vessel of pain before anything else.
The thing is, the emphasis on Monroe’s struggles, which so widely dominates the cultural conversation around her, certainly serves to make her seem more human – it’s not like she was some invincible Hollywood machine – but at the same time, in tying up her legacy with pain, we ignore everything else that made her such a captivating person. In some strange paradoxical way, the preoccupation with Monroe’s suffering has only turned her into more of an enigma, because she is so often reduced to two categories: tragic figure or blonde bombshell sex symbol.
On her 100th anniversary, what’s important to remember is that while Monroe was a complex figure – who isn’t? – she was also a smart, talented woman. It shouldn’t be groundbreaking to say that it’s important to remember the sides of Monroe that weren’t the suffering or the white dress or her nude Playboy shoot, but somehow it still needs to be said that Monroe was much more than her body and the things it endured.
In that Playboy issue, published in 1953, the magazine asks, “What makes Marilyn the real article?” before proceeding to hypothesise.
“Is it her body?” they ponder, “There is no denying that the young lady is very well-stacked.”
Her measurements are debated, and they even write “her curves really aren’t that spectacular,” but then it’s concluded that Monroe knows how to use her body and her face, unlike anyone else. “She is natural sex personified,” Playboy suggested. From the beginning, her body was the main topic of discussion, the way she “shatters whole rows of beer steins with a single, seductive look”.
But what about Monroe the intellectual? She was an avid bookworm, but the response to an image of her reading James Joyce’s famously challenging novel Ulysses serves as the ultimate proof of the way she has always been misunderstood… ‘She definitely didn’t read Ulysses,’ people cry, and she definitely did – Monroe owned hundreds of books, from collections of poetry by WB Yeats to classic novels like Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
Is it so outrageous to imagine that a woman can be both beautiful and intelligent? Apparently so, in the case of Monroe. When she wasn’t reading, she was often writing and studying, even attending literature and art history night classes at UCLA during the early 1950s. She loved to visit galleries, to cook, to write her own poems, to sing, to act, to read. But so much of Monroe’s wider public image, even 100 years on from when she was born, remains that of the dumb, curvaceous blonde – and a victim.
In celebration of her centenary, it’s crucial we remember that Monroe was a talented performer with a rich interior world before we remember her as a drug-addled case study for Hollywood’s uneasy landscape, where individuals as interesting as Monroe were chewed up and spat out – she was so much more than that, so much more than a blonde beauty-marked bombshell.
Monroe should be remembered most for how she defied expectations, proving that a woman can be multiple things at once, but most of all, she was a smart and fascinating person who deserves to be immortalised for so much more than just the things she endured, or for the body she was born in.
