Marilyn Monroe — the ultimate movie star, and probably the most famous face to come out of Hollywood — turned 100 this June. From Los Angeles to Paris, New York to London, events celebrating this icon of popular culture have been launched this summer. I got to witness the Paris show, on view until July 26, which was a rare treat.
La Cinémathèque Française, the venue for cinephiles in Paris, is celebrating Monroe with an impressive exhibition curated by Florence Tissot. We also watched a new documentary, ‘Marilyn Monroe — I am So Many People’, by sisters Clara Kuperberg and Julia Kuperberg. Between the show and the documentary, Monroe has returned in all her glory — complexities and controversies and all.
Turns out, Monroe never went away: she has a combined following of 15.5 million across social media platforms. What is more, over 54 per cent of them are under 34. Monroe’s life, and the way she died, has been a subject of public obsession for decades, spawning multiple works of fiction and non-fiction — several books (Goodreads lists 14 of them), including one by Truman Capote, who considered Monroe a friend and muse, and films such as ‘My Week with Marilyn’ (2011) and the Netflix biopic ‘Blonde’ (2022).
While this has sustained interest in her films, the focus has inevitably been elsewhere. Monroe’s often messy, always fascinating private life has been relentlessly dissected by the media and consumed with great relish by a public that has adored and reviled her in equal measure.
The Paris exhibition attempts to step back and take a clear-eyed look at both the person and her work. Through a fine collection of film stills, behind-the-scenes shots, typed screenplays, iconic film clips, not to mention glamorous outfits from films/premieres — ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’, ‘The Seven Year Itch’, ‘Bus Stop’, ‘Some Like It Hot’, and ‘The Misfits’, to name some — it seeks to build a portrait of the actor beyond the gossip and the scandal.
The curator zooms in on each of her important films, scrutinising her characters, placing them in their context. The backdrop stands out vividly with its sharp research, social insights and commentary. Within the finite space of the wall, the images and text not only map Monroe’s remarkable life, but use it as a colourful and accurate vehicle to examine the cultural landscape of the 1940s-60s America.
Through photographs, typed screenplays, iconic film clips and glamorous outfits, the show seeks to build a portrait of the actor beyond the gossip and the scandal.
Through Monroe’s filmography, Tissot arrives at astute socio-cultural observations each time. ‘The Seven Year Itch’ (1955), for example, is seen in the context of the prosperity and the conservatism of the 1950s. Monroe had turned into a sex goddess overnight with the arrival of Playboy magazine — her calendar nudes, from 1949, were leaked for the launch issue of the magazine in 1952. This, along with the popularity of Freudian ideas, the Kinsey Report on sexuality, and the relaxation of film censorship in the face of competition from TV, eased, somewhat, the prudish norms in American society and fanned the build-up of Monroe’s sexual image. “In a way, Billy Wilder (the director) and Monroe satisfied the puritanism of the era while simultaneously mocking it,” the commentary observes.
The show also highlights important milestones in American showbiz and media with wit and subtlety, while foregrounding the Monroe story. At the time when the young Norma Jeane (Monroe’s real name) entered modelling, pin-ups were a symbol of the era. The war was still raging in Europe, and pin-ups were, at first, strangely seen as patriotic. And then, only in the ’50s, they went on to symbolise domestic bliss. “Pin-ups were young, white and happy, eroticised but not vulgar, and never individualised — a feminine ideal, characterised by a sort of sexual naivety.” The studios exploited this entirely in Monroe’s films.
The show also shines a light on Hollywood, from its star system since the mid-1940s, when Monroe signed up with 20th Century Fox, to the development of colour and widescreen technologies. Along the way, it explores the loud, exploitative, misogynistic and racist culture in the segregation-era studios, the larger-than-life characters, and the PR and marketing machinery that set the often murky rules of the game. Of course, there are famous collaborations that are revealed — Clarke Gable, Montgomery Clift, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Lauren Bacall, Ginger Rogers and, most famously, Laurence Olivier. Monroe survived — in fact, thrived — in these choppy waters and used the exploitative system to her advantage.
The feminist lens of the curation gives it an important dimension. It critiques the viscerally patriarchal lens of Hollywood — “female characters who dissociate romantic love from their search for a rich husband” were typical of so many films, including ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’. On the other hand, it highlights “the smart, comedic, emotionally independent and sexually aggressive blonde” that Monroe often played, which triggered men’s concerns about their own masculinity and how to put a woman in her place.
I was especially delighted to encounter Monroe’s feminist bond with the great Ella Fitzgerald. As a friend and champion, Monroe pushed open doors for this enormously talented singer that were firmly shut to people of colour then.
Monroe’s personal life is chronicled in parallel through rare images accompanied by sharp, cryptic text. Monroe’s personal belongings — photos from her childhood and adolescence, letters, account statements, and personal items — help us encounter an almost flesh-and-blood woman, considering her life has had a touch of the unreal throughout. She started life, Cinderella-style: “an absent father, a dangerous mother… poverty and mistreatment during an unhappy childhood.”
Her saga of elopement and marriage at 16, a quick divorce, and then being discovered by a photographer to be a model has fascinated generations. Monroe’s love life —including her famous and famously divergent husbands Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller — led to enormous curiosity and chatter, which reached a frenzied peak during her friendship with President John F Kennedy. Monroe’s troubles with mental health and addiction, and her sudden death under mysterious circumstances, were a fitting denouement of her dramatic life, which naturally made her an enigma forever.
Monroe died at 36, at the peak of her powers. Today, at 100, she remains a symbol of eternal youth and frank sensuality.
— The writer is an author and researcher