men May, a portrait of a woman sold at auction in New York for $195m (£157m) – a record for a work of art by an American artist and by any artist of the 20th century. That month, also in New York, there was a furore when a dress the woman had once worn was displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art gala by a reality TV star. The dress is said to be “the most expensive dress in the world”; its owner paid almost 5 million dollars for it. To ensure its safety, it is normally kept under special conditions in a darkened vault.
The woman in the portrait, the woman who once wore the dress, to sing happy birthday to the president John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden, it was, of course, Marilyn Monroe. The brightly colored screen print of her, the work of Andy Warhol, is the most famous of her pop art works. Kim Kardashian, whose gimmick was wearing Monroe’s dress to the Met, responded to criticism of her wearing a deceased woman’s clothes by oddly insisting that she had “a lot of respect” for her.
In life, Monroe made a name for herself far beyond Hollywood and in a way very different from the cheesy “sex bomb” image that is the leitmotif of her modern iconography. Twenty years before physical exercise became a fad, she went running. She voraciously read serious literature, Dostoevsky in particular. As early as 1950, studio executives had found it necessary to warn her not to be seen reading politically radical books. Before the decade was out, Ella Monroe would marry Arthur Miller, at the very time the playwright was being investigated for his dalliances with communism. She supported the burgeoning civil rights movement. She was a founding member of Sane’s Hollywood branch, the Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy.
Yet 60 years after her death, Monroe’s vivid presence in world culture (only Diana, Princess of Wales rivals her power over the public imagination) is uncompromising. The star’s massive sexpot street art can be seen from Istanbul to Penang, Cannes to Vancouver. A Monroe silk scrunchie to celebrate”[her] authenticity, self-acceptance and self-confidence” retails for £42. A “life-size hyper-realistic silicone figurine statue” is a trim at £13,000.
Monroe remains a lucrative and usefully mutable asset. The Montblanc Marilyn Monroe Special Edition Pearl ballpoint pen is yours to £660. A lamp showing Monroe with the wind lifting her skirt is just £148. Across the planet, Monroe features decorate everything from cookbooks to coffee mugs to bags and ties. Countless Facebook groups, Pinterest boards, Instagram accounts and fan sites (Marilyn Remembered, Our Marilyn, Immortal Marilyn, Marilyn Monroe’s Irish fan club) are dedicated to her.
I wrote a biography of the star in 1985, seeking to penetrate the jungle of factoids about her and emerge with something approximating the truth about her life and controversial death. Since her publication, the appetite for all things Monroe, particularly the seedier side of her legacy, has only grown more ravenous. In recent months, millions have watched a netflix documentary based on the interviews I recorded for that book. Netflix will be released in September Blonda long-awaited fiction film starring Ana de Armas.
It is billed as a “biographical film” and, according to director Andrew Dominik, as “an emotional nightmarish fairy tale.” It is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by the American author Joyce Carol Oates, which was published in 2000. The novel, Oates wrote in a preface, was a “radically distilled ‘life’ of Marilyn Monroe.” By radically distilled, he explained, she meant that she had been very selective, she had used real-life facts and characters (she credited my biography as one of her primary sources), but freely imagined much more.
In Oates’ 700-page novel, the main character is usually called Norma Jeane, the name Monroe was born with and known until her film career took off. Later, she is “Marilyn Monroe”. During World War II, the novel’s Norma Jeane works at Radio Plane, a company that does war work, and the future star worked at that company. Later, when she rises to fame, she marries first “the ex-athlete” and then “the playwright,” transparent references to Monroe’s husbands, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller.
The mostly miserable sexual experiences dominate Blonde, with an emphasis on the tyranny and betrayal of many of her men. Early in the book, Norma Jeane is raped by a Hollywood studio mogul who is assigned the name “Mr. Z”. The rape scene is graphically written, sparing no detail. “Mr Z” has been interpreted as a thinly veiled reference to Twentieth Century Fox founder Darryl Zanuck. The real-life Monroe recalled “casting couch” sexual encounters, but nothing suggests that any of them were with Zanuck. In interviews with nearly 700 people, I found nothing to suggest that any Hollywood producer raped Monroe.
However, in Oates’s novel, the most blatant historical libel points to Monroe’s 1962 involvement with “the president.” “The President,” from an enormously wealthy Irish-American family, is a clear reference to Kennedy. In the novel, the president peremptorily asks to see Monroe, has sex with her repeatedly, and then becomes unavailable until “the summons” arrives again.
Monroe flies to the White House. There is more sex, talk about communist Cuba and Fidel Castro, and even more sex. Back in Los Angeles, she dreams that the president has gotten her pregnant. Then comes another summons, another flight to the east. She sings “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” at Madison Square Garden. Then, on her return to Los Angeles, she desolation and death.
In the novel, death comes “hurried towards her” in the form of a man “without passion and without mercy”, a murderer. The man does not know if his mission is to “protect the President from the President’s blonde whore” or if his true purpose is to “harm the President by being associated with the blonde whore.” Using a key given to him by a person identified as “RF”, the killer enters Monroe’s home at night when she is asleep. Then, equipped with a syringe loaded with a lethal dose of a sleeping drug, “[sinks] the six-inch needle to the hilt in his heart.”
Oates’s novel makes it clear that references to “president” in the book are to Kennedy. Also, no one would interpret his reference to “RF” as a code for someone other than “RFK”: the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
Why do I call the “fictional” story of Oates flirting with the Kennedys “historical libel”? Credible information suggests that Kennedy was flirting with Monroe. Ella’s brother Robert, the investigation indicates, also had some sort of covert connection to her. However, there is no evidence that they or anyone else murdered her. Is it defensible to write and publish this scenario in a novel, especially when the people involved are still fresh in memory? A scenario that might suggest the president’s brother aided and abetted, he ordered? – murder?
When Oates’s novel came out, her defense was that, in a work of fiction, she “had no particular obligation” to the facts. In my opinion, that is not so. The people he named in her novel were real people with real reputations, and historical legacies, and such fictional fabrication is unjustifiably cruel. The fact that the individuals in question are dead is not a defense.
Will the next movie tell the same story? Dominik has said that the film will be “critical of America’s sacred cows”, including Kennedy, and that “there is something about it that offends everyone”. It is evident that the film will push the limits. Netflix reportedly insisted on hiring an editor to “curb the excesses” of the production. Even so, it has an NC-17 rating which, in theory, prevents anyone under the age of 17 in the US from viewing it.
Dominik is not beating around the bush. He says the film is what you’d want from “the NC-17 version of the Marilyn Monroe story.” He continues, “If the audience doesn’t like it, that’s the audience’s damn problem.” More soberly, he claims that the film would not have been made without the #MeToo movement; which tells what it is like “to be an unloved child, to go through the Hollywood meat grinder… how a childhood trauma shapes an adult divided between a public and a private self”.
After seeing a preview version, Oates found the film to be “brilliant, very disturbing, perhaps most surprisingly a totally ‘feminist’ performance.” Dominick has since risky that “Blonde will be one of the 10 best movies ever made.”
“The scale of the Monroe myth is impossible to measure,” Professor Sarah Churchwell has written. More books have been written about the star than about any other artist. More than 20 films already offer a fictional version of his life story. Will the next movie be an indulgent romp in his sex life and conspiracy fantasies about his death, or will it deliver something worthwhile?
John Huston, who directed Monroe’s first substantial film (1950’s The Asphalt Jungle) as well as the last she completed (1961’s The Misfits), said, “People say Hollywood broke her heart, but that’s a nonsense: she was observant and tough-minded… In a way, she was very cunning.” the woman herself.”
“How do you go about writing a life story?” Monroe herself asked herself during an interview just before she died. “Because the real stuff is rarely put into circulation. It’s usually the fake stuff… It’s hard to know where to start, you know, if you don’t start with the truth.”