Remembering Marilyn Monroe
Anthony Burgess on a Hollywood legend
This week we are celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Marilyn Monroe, who requires no introduction. Among the pantheon of Hollywood icons of the last century, she is the most easily recognisable. Her feature films — such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot — are regularly repeated on television, and the details of her life have been probed in an astonishing number of popular narratives and documentaries. The most recent of these is Reframed: Marilyn Monroe, a four-part CNN series, currently available to stream on the BBC iPlayer.
Writers and film-makers have found Monroe’s short life to be an inexhaustible source of material. For examples one has only to look at films such as Marilyn and Me and My Week With Marilyn. The torrent of biographies seems to be never-ending, with at least a handful of new books appearing each year. Even Norman Mailer, the American writer and journalist, who was not known for his profound understanding of women or feminism, was persuaded to write a magazine essay and two biographies of Monroe when he was short of money.
Anthony Burgess was commissioned by an Italian newspaper to write a memorial essay for Marilyn Monroe on the thirtieth anniversary of her death in 1992. He used this as a pretext to embark on a wide-ranging examination of her career in films and the politics which surrounded it.
‘It is generally accepted,’ he writes, ‘that she did not take her own life but was murdered by the Mafia.’ Why would anyone wish to kill her? ‘She was deeply involved, in an amatory capacity, with the President [John F. Kennedy] and his brother, the Attorney General. The Mob hated both, since they had embarked on a plan of purification of the American scene, and they were to eliminate both, with the elimination of their sex goddess as a warming-up act.’
Burgess’s analysis belongs firmly in the world of Oliver Stone’s JFK movie, with its writhing snake-pit of conspirators and conspiracies. But the history of the Kennedy family has always given rise to unlikely theories, and perhaps we should not be surprised to find a distant observer such as Burgess believing in at least some of them.
When he considers Monroe’s professional work outside the political arena, he is on more solid ground. Showing a wide — but not exhaustive — knowledge of her films, he is unexpectedly attentive to questions such as female agency:
In the film How to Marry a Millionaire, Marilyn played a girl desperately short-sighted: without her spectacles she walks into walls. This image made her comic, but not pitiably so. Her elegance, the cut of her clothes and the poise of her body, above all the sensual messages she unwittingly gave out, conspired to arouse a laughter of which she herself was in control.
In common with many of the observers who came before and after him, Burgess was intrigued by Monroe’s marriage to the playwright Arthur Miller, whose book of memoirs, Timebends, he reviewed on publication in November 1987. Commenting on Miller’s inside account of this marriage, Burgess writes:
Miller has been blamed for exploiting the pain and suffering of Marilyn in the character of Maggie in After the Fall [his stage play of 1964]. But that play, whose theme is what Miller calls ‘the paradox of denial’, is primarily about Germany, and it was written when Marilyn ‘was probably leading as good a working life as the movie business would permit.’ But, when the identification of Marilyn and Maggie was made, Miller was willing to regard it as less an impertinent, if proleptic, opening of her wounds in public than an ennoblement of a sex symbol to a tragic heroine.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Burgess has very little to say about The Misfits, the only Monroe film written for her by Arthur Miller. In his 1992 essay on Marilyn, Burgess adds a detail that he omitted from the book review, illuminating the grubby objectification that she was forced to endure because of her status as a sex symbol: ‘Miller, in his autobiography, noted that men would covertly masturbate in her presence.’
Elsewhere, Burgess deploys his knowledge of working for Hollywood studios when he considers Marilyn’s significance within the larger context of the film industry in the 1960s:
She was one of the blonde goddesses of the silver screen, one of two only, the other being Jean Harlow. Joan Crawford and Bette Davis were great stars, but they conquered through melodramatic aggression: they lacked the yielding, vulnerable quality which men see as essentially feminine. Besides, they were not blondes.
Towards the end of his essay, Burgess admits that, by 1992, Marilyn had already become a free-floating signifier, an image rather than a real person, whose ongoing magnetism ‘no amount of analysis can properly explain.’
Burgess concludes that Marilyn Monroe will live forever because she represents a distinctively American form of celebrity. ‘It was not a face that could have come out of Greece or Italy. It was an American face that exuded American optimism.’ It was entirely fitting, he said, that her image came to represent America as the land of promise. ‘Promise unfulfilled, like Marilyn herself.’
Find out more
Read Anthony Burgess at the Movies, the Burgess Foundation’s blog series about his interest in cinema.
Read Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess, in which the protagonist finds work in Hollywood (affiliate link).
Read You’ve Had Your Time by Anthony Burgess, in which he writes about his adventures in the screen trade (affiliate link).
Pre-order the paperback of Anthony Burgess’s A Shorter Ulysses, an abridged version of James Joyce’s classic novel (affiliate link).
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