“I
knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or
even beautiful but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else,”
writes Marilyn Monroe in her unfinished autobiography (Steinem 9). Indeed, her
short, tumultuous life was not her own. She belonged to her audiences and to
the studios, perhaps the last of the larger-than-life movie-movie stars whose
images depended on, were shaped and shattered by the public. A fiction of the
fifties, she became the ghost of the sixties, and, in her death and the
poignancy of her incompleteness, secured her enduring power. She was a myth, a
fantasy, a hypothesis, a radiating image of the American Dream, and the image
had little to do with reality. The shy little girl who was never allowed to
mature into a woman, Norma Jeane, was what set her apart from all the other sex
goddesses. She was not a goddess, but an angel of sex. Her wistfulness,
yearning, innocence, and childish naiveté lent a soft edge of sadness to her
performances. The true auteur of her films, she infused every corner of them
and invested sex with sweetness; she was a vulnerable, virgin-like vamp. Her
best films, among them Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes (1953), Billy Wilder’s The
Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like
It Hot (1959), Joshua Logan’s Bus
Stop (1956) and John Huston’s The
Misfits(1961), suggest the discrepancy between the reality of the woman
(and little girl) represented by Norma Jeane and the illusion of the sexpot
represented by Marilyn Monroe.
