Our love affair with Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe has been dead all my life, or at least all my conscious life. Yet even so, the idea still doesn't sit right. "Marilyn Monroe is dead." That's like saying life and joy and sex and fun are dead. How screwed up does the world have to be that it can't even keep Marilyn Monroe alive?

She died 50 years ago tonight. Maybe somebody killed her. (Just the thought makes you want to grab your head and scream.) Maybe she killed herself. (I still want to grab my head and scream.) Or maybe she died by accident. (Better, but still awful.) And yet in the years since, no one who has died has seemed less dead.

Indeed, it's safe to say that in the entire history of the world, the image of no woman dead for half a century has maintained the same allure or the same modernity. We can look at a picture of a supreme beauty like Ava Gardner or Rita Hayworth and wonder what she was doing with that haircut or that outfit. They are of their time. But I would venture to say that there is not one photograph of Marilyn and not one frame from one of her movies in which she looks anything other than fresh, immediate and timeless.

What is this thing she had, that she still has? She was beautiful, beyond belief beautiful, and yet her beauty had to have something to do with her, with who she was as a person. Otherwise, why was her beauty undiminished on those occasions when she looked puffy or drugged or chubby or haggard or silly or exhausted? She was insanely sensual - even a photo of her reading a book looks like the prelude to a ! carnal romp - and yet again, it wasn't just her body, but her soul. The camera saw this, and we recognize it.

True worth

One crucial aspect of her appeal, intrinsic to that combination of physical beauty and spirit that she was, is this: Marilyn makes people watching her feel that, if she knew them, she would like them. But no, it's more than that. She makes them feel that she would see them and their true worth, their true virtue. It's not just men who feel this. Women feel it, too, and like her. So do children.

Needless to say, with a grown man this reaction becomes all the more powerful, tied up with dreams of sex and love: Almost unique among the most beautiful women of the past century - Jean Harlow is the only other possible exception - there is nothing mean about Marilyn's sexuality. She's not scowling or threatening or even particularly challenging. If you met her at a party, she would be the easiest woman on Earth to pick up, but of course only you could do it, because she'd want to be loved by you, just you and nobody else but you. What Marilyn offers is complete and total and absolute acceptance.

That's why we call her "Marilyn" and not "Monroe" - not because we know her, but because we feel she knows us. She has been looking at us all our lives saying yes, you're great, you're so smart, and you're so funny, and I love you. Let's have fun forever!

Rescue fantasy

And this is why she has been and remains the ultimate rescue fantasy. If she loves us and us alone, then only we can save her. Thus every man in the real life she lived (dumbo Joe, smirky Miller, goonish Sinatra) becomes repugnant to us, and why her death, as well as every sordid detail of it - lying sideways across the bed, hand on the phone, face down in the pillow - remains a fresh affront. It's a story with the wr! ong endin! g.

Some may see that ending as foreordained, the inevitable consequence of Marilyn's fragile psyche and her loveless childhood. Under the best of circumstances, to achieve fame as the most beautiful woman in the world is a heavy burden, an invitation to narcissism and panic at possessing such a powerful yet dwindling commodity.

Even a reasonably stable person might break under such pressure, and Marilyn was hardly stable. In her last interviews, you can almost hear her fragmenting, as she laughs and tells anecdotes about people reacting to her as "Marilyn Monroe." It's as though she is trying to discover her intrinsic worth through the eyes of others.

But the times in which she lived didn't help at all. What a wretched irony that perhaps the most desirable woman to breathe air, at least since the invention of photography, came to prominence in the one decade most likely to suffocate her, the 1950s. The '20s, the '30s, the '40s, the '60s - anything would have been better than the '50s, with its thuggishness and prurience, its puritanism and giddy lewdness. Those qualities make some of her best-known movies ("Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," "The Seven Year Itch") difficult to sit through today. Only her last three films - "Some Like It Hot," "Let's Make Love" and "The Misfits" - are free of cringe-worthy moments.

Toll of the '50s

Even worse is the toll that the era's guilty lust and judgment took on her. Go to YouTube, and watch Marilyn's press conferences. Watch her eyes - as sensitive as a snail's feelers - as they gauge, millisecond by millisecond, every hint of hostility and condescension, every tonal implication that she was some kind of idiot.

They all treated her that way, not just reporters, but the Kennedys and all the other men in her circle. They needed to believe she was a fool, because to really see her would have been to recognize that she was more alive and more aware than any of them and their precious wives. It would have required a complete overhaul of th! eir value! s and their vestigial morality. No, the era in which she lived didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, but it opened the bottle and dumped the pills into her hand.

Yet if only she could have held on a few years longer. Politics, culture and social and sexual morality were about to move in her direction, to tell her, "Hey, kid, you're not the one who's crazy." And the aging that she dreaded? She had nothing to fear. Already in her last photos you can see what Marilyn was going to look like at 45, 50, 55. ... She would have been lovely and so wise for having survived the wars.

No, in a better world, Marilyn Monroe would not be dead 50 years ago. She would be 86 years old, perhaps only now putting her affairs in order, and looking back on a life of triumph. That's the life we keep wanting to give her, every time we see her onscreen. It's the life that she deserved.