The recent death of Anna Nicole Smith, who worshipped the imagery of Marilyn Monroe led me to ponder again how there is something really disturbing about our pop cultural love of Marilyn Monroe. Yes, she’s achingly photogenic and very charismatic on film but her status as some kind of eternal icon of womanhood rings suspicious bells for me. Why do we like our sexual icons of womanhood not just breakable, but broken?
The first thing you know about Marilyn Monroe is that she was a sex goddess and the second thing you probably know about her is that she killed herself, rejected and abandoned – so famous is her death. She took an overdose of pills and died in her bed laying naked across her telephone, wretchedly miserable about being on the losing side of yet another affair with a married man. Are the tragic circumstances of her death part of her sexual mystique? If so, we are very creepy.
However we keep reinventing this woman – “in the 1950’s.. part kewpie doll, part vixen. In the feminist ’70s and ’80s, the dead Marilyn was seen as a victim of patriarchy, while the postfeminist ’90s reinvented her as a not-so-dumb blonde who used her power shrewdly” – her mythology still ends up coming down to two things, sex goddess and tragic suicide.
This news article about freshly uncovered FBI documents, indicates that a conspiracy of people, most of whom were either people working for Marilyn Monroe or people having sex with her prodded her along enough until left to her own self-destructive devices she killed herself –
Critically, it raises an alleged conspiracy, apparently overseen by Lawford, for Monroe to unwittingly commit suicide with the drug Seconal, a barbiturate used to treat insomnia and relieve anxiety. The document gives no precise reason why she would be killed but hints it may be linked to her threats to make public her affair with (Bobby) Kennedy, as other conspiracy theories have previously claimed. It states in part: “Peter Lawford, [censored words blacked out] knew from Marilyn’s friends that she often made suicide attempts and that she was inclined to fake a suicide attempt in order to arouse sympathy.
“Lawford is reported as having made ‘special arrangements’ with Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr Ralph Greenson, from Beverley Hills. The psychiatrist was treating Marilyn for emotional problems and getting her off the use of barbiturates. On her last visit to him he prescribed Seconal tablets and gave her a prescription for 60 of them, which was unusual in quantity especially since he saw her frequently. On the date of her death … her housekeeper put the bottle of pills on the night table. It is reported that the housekeeper and Marilyn’s personal secretary and press agent, Pat Newcomb, were co-operating in the plan to induce suicide.”
So lets get this straight. It appears Marilyn Monroe was having an affair with Bobby Kennedy who hollowly promised to divorce his wife and marry her. What kind of woman was she? Lonely, fragile, deep in a denial of her own making? What kind of man was he? A man who was finding his affair a nuisance? A man who knew his lover was so depressed and desperate for attention that she frequently attempted suicide. A man who understood that with a little orchestration she would simply dispose of herself. A man who made a phone call to check if. she. was. dead. yet. This is our mythology of sex goddesses? This is our sexual icon of womanhood?
Being a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry, especially when one is tired, hurt and bewildered. – Marilyn Monroe
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