How Marilyn Monroe inspired Elton John song ‘Candle In The Wind’
Elton John’s ‘Candle In The Wind’ takes a harrowing glance at fame and its tendency to build stars up merely to chew them out later. John has endured this pain of intrusive media coverage first-hand and instantly connected with Bernie Taupin’s lyrics, which were inspired by the traffic fate of Marilyn Monroe.
Monroe was presented as Hollywood’s ultimate sex symbol and became the face of celebrity culture. She was at the top of the film industry for a decade, but in the background, Monroe was battling against depression, substance abuse and crippling anxiety. In 1960, following her divorce from Arthur Miller, she sought help from a psychiatrist, which makes for painful reading considering how her story ended.
Fame is unnatural, and it’s easy to comprehend why many people don’t have the tools to cope with it. The list of those who have lost their privacy and the chance to enjoy normality at the expense of success is too long to count, but none are more high-profile than Marilyn Monroe.
In the first line of ‘Candle In The Wind’, John refers to the birth name of Marilyn Monroe and sings, “Goodbye Norma Jeane”. When Jeane became Monroe, she had to wave goodbye to her old life and fully inhabit the character she was ordered to play by Hollywood.
Taupin, John’s longtime collaborator, has tried to play down the inspiration of Monroe on ‘Candle In The Wind’ and said he’s far from a “rabid Marilyn Monroe fanatic”. According to SongFacts, Taupin commented: “I think the biggest misconception about ‘Candle In The Wind’ is that I was this rabid Marilyn Monroe fanatic, which really couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s not that I didn’t have a respect for her. It’s just that the song could just as easily have been about James Dean or Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain. I mean, it could have been about Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf.”
He continued: “I mean, basically, anybody, any writer, actor, actress, or musician who died young and sort of became this iconic picture of Dorian Gray, that thing where they simply stopped ageing. It’s a beauty frozen in time. In a way, I’m fascinated with that concept. So it’s really about how fame affects the man or woman in the street, that whole adulation thing and the fanaticism of fandom.”
Following the death of Princess Diana, who famously struggled with the downsides of fame and prematurely lost her life due to media intrusion, Taupin altered the lyric from ‘Goodbye Norma Jeane’ to ‘Goodbye England’s Rose’. Elton also performed the track at Diana’s funeral, and as a result, ‘Candle In The Wind ’97’ spent several months perched at the top of the charts in the United States. While Diana will forever be intrinsically linked to the song, it’s worth remembering Marilyn Monroe was the initial inspiration behind the hit.
