There is nothing pretty about sexual abuse, but Marilyn Monroe made it look that way. She helped make sexual exploitation acceptable in our time. She made it beautiful and glamorous.
She will probably be the most famous woman in history – or actually, the most famous girl in history. She was the girl who never grew up. She was also a girl that never existed. She was a stage personality, and like many other stage personalities she was the exact opposite of the real person behind the image. Marilyn Monroe, the happy innocent, was neither happy nor innocent.
I am now reading her biography by Barbara Leaming, which came out in 1998. Norma Jeane Baker’s problems started before she was born. Her grandmother was manic-depressive, and she died in a straightjacket in a state mental hospital. Her grandfather died of syphilis. Many of the men in her family were violent alcoholics. Her mother was a paranoid schizophrenic who alternated between violent rages and interludes of rigidity and muteness. Norma Jean grew up in a series of foster homes. At one point she picked up a stray dog, which she named Tippy. Every morning, the little black-and-white dog followed her to the Washington High School, waiting outside until she was finished. When she was seven, a neighbor attacked Tippy with a garden hoe, and in front of the screaming child, sliced the dog in two.
Later, she was expelled from several foster homes after she was sexually assaulted. The abusers were never punished, but Norma Jeane was. In her early years as an aspiring model-actress, she often attended parties for Hollywood executives where the young women at the party often accompanied the men to the upstairs bedrooms.
Marilyn Monroe, a really amazing person, managed to turn this history into a triumph in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. To quote from Leaming:
For all her intense sexuality, Marilyn communicated that on some level, she, too was as uncertain about sex, and as vulnerable to being hurt by it as anyone else. Far from being the doomed sinner her mother branded her, she was actually a sweet, innocent, good girl whom everybody should love. Audiences were thrilled and relieved to discover that is was all right to laugh at sex; but so, in her own, every touching way, was Marilyn. That personal element infused her performance with special power.
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