August 5, 2012, marks the 50th anniversary of the death (by suicide or accidental drug overdose, discounting various conspiracy theories) of film icon Marilyn Monroe. I'm not a huge movie buff; I actually don't think I've seen one of her films all the way through.
Yet her story is fascinating for what it reveals about the nature of sexual attractiveness, and also as an example of the sort of suffering Buddhists call "dukkha". Here we have someone who got past an abusive childhood to get to the point where she "had it all": fame, adulation, money...but it wasn't enough to fill the hole inside. She was not suffering from poverty, physical illness; her career was bumpy but looking up. What caused her to either take her own life, or become so dependant on drugs she was set up for a fatal accident? In a way, this woman the world adored died of loneliness.
In a recent New York Times op-ed, Maureen Dowd quotes Mike Nichols, a director who was also one of Monroe's classmates studying acting under Lee Strasberg. Nichols says of Marilyn, “She wasn’t particularly a great beauty, that is to say, Hedy Lamarr or Ava Gardner would knock the hell out of her in a contest, but she was almost superhumanly sexual.” This is the first part of the fascination: while Norma Jeane was by no means an unattractive lady, judging by a 1945 photo she wouldn't set the world on fire.
But she became a
master of self-reinvention, that great American art form. Over years as a model and an actress, and with a touch of help from plastic surgery, Norma Jeane Dougherty (nee Baker / Mortenson -- even that's complicated) refined her look and her mannerisms to create Marilyn Monroe.
"Marilyn’s like a veil I wear over Norma Jeane," she once said. I think anyone with a public persona (a word whose root actually means "mask") can understand that feeling.
But when what people fall in love with is the veil, the mask -- what then? No amount of love for the mask can satisfy the person behind it.
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