Marilyn Monroe, the saddest smile in Hollywood
She was fired from her for "being too s**xual", she had eleven toes and some still suspect that her death was murder
She slept with only a few drops of Chanel # 5, she had eleven toes and as a child she wanted to be Alice in Wonderland. She stuttered, she was sensitive and also neurotic. She turned her Happy Birthday into a national anthem when she sang it at Madison Square Garden to US President John F. Kennedy, one of thousands of her lovers, and was fired as a model for being "too much s**xual".
She played countless dumb blondes, but she wasn't one of them. "Lies lies lies. Nothing but lies. Everything that has been said about me is lies, "she confessed to her friend, photographer George Barris. You only saw the lights, the smile, the stunning image; but her life was surrounded by shadows, fueled still more by the conspiracies that still surround her death half a century later. She speculated on her suicide when she was found n**ked, with the phone off the hook and an overdose of barbiturates.
She was 36 years old. "He never seemed happier to me (...) I was reading 'To Kill a Mockingbird' those days. In the end she told me: 'I love you, I'll see you on Monday or when you come' (...) Less than twenty-four hours after this call, Marilyn was found dead, "says Barris in" Marilyn Monroe. When you grow up you will be beautiful, happy and famous »(Confluencias, 2016). This Wednesday, June 1, turned into a myth of the seventh art, the stormy and irreducible Norma Jean Baker would have turned 90 years old.
A gifted girl overshadowed by cliches
Preceded by clichés, few dared to see beyond her voluptuous image and her golden waves. Marilyn Monroe represented the American dream of many women in Hollywood's golden age, but her life was marked by tragedy, by the broken childhood of "illegitimate daughter," by the darkness that she tried to dispel with a disenchanted smile.
She surpassed the roles of 60 seconds in the cinema, and pronounced her first words on screen in "The Asphalt Jungle", with John Huston, who would also direct her in her last culminated film, "Rebel Lives", where three misunderstood characters look for a place to fit. They never found it. They were Montgomery Clift, Clark Gable and Marilyn, and within a few months of filming the end, all three leads died.
In order to achieve success on the big screen, he sacrificed her very essence: she dyed her hair platinum blonde and let a vent lift her skirt in "Temptation lives upstairs," the straw that broke the camel's back in her marriage. with Joe DiMaggio. She became the Marilyn Monroe myth, and the world forgot the person, Norma Jean Baker. «She always drove by the theater with my name on the marquee. Was she that excited? I just wished they had used 'Norma Jean' so that all the children in the school and the orphanage who ignored me could see it, ”she assured in 1948.
Marked by a broken childhood, drifting between s**xual abuse and foster homes, she always sought the company of men with whom she tried to mitigate the absence of her father. She exploited her voluptuousness as a model and, four years after posing n**de for just $ 50, the cover image of her ran out of print for the Hugh Hefner Playboy issue. "When you grow up you will be beautiful, rich and famous," her aunt Ana told him about her, and she did. She got her dream, to become an actress, and Hollywood was never strong enough to resist.
In "Marilyn had eleven toes and other Hollywood legends" (Lunwerg, 2016), the illustrator MarÃa Herreros collects a quote from her last husband. After her death, the playwright Arthur Miller assured that, “if she had survived, she would have had to become a cynic or have lost more contact with reality yet. Instead, she was like a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd that was throwing away her clothes. "
Dramatic life and comedy in the cinema
Although she always looked for roles to exploit her dramatic profile, it was her physique and her comic vision that elevated the complex Marilyn Monroe to the annals of cinema. She captivated some of the best directors in film mecca, and many of them could not resist having her again. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Howard Hawks, George Cukor or Billy Wilder. And titles for the memory such as "With skirts and crazy", "Niagara", "The temptation lives above", "N**ked Eve" or "Boys prefer blondes", the paradigm of that mirror in which he liked to look ... although he was never quite there.
George Barris "could see a certain sadness in his eyes, even though he had learned to smile, like a clown with a broken heart", that is why in his book he vindicates the naturalness of his friend, and her innocence. A friend who never hesitated to use her charms to captivate the public, and especially the directors of a patriarchal and always frivolous Hollywood who preferred to profit from her beauty, and do without the other Marilyn, the intelligent one (she had an IQ of 168 ) and inspired, surrounded by intellectuals, like his friend Truman Capote.
During the audition for the film 'Canned Love', another eminence fell for her: 'Groucho asked me if she could walk in such a way that when she did, smoke would come out of her head. I told him that he could. I walked around the room and when I turned around, smoke was coming out of Groucho's head! And so she got a small role in the film, playing, of course, the blonde girl from the theater.
Barris himself, who armed with his camera was always looking for the best shot, fell in love with Monroe's body language as he prepared a script. «She began by lying down to relax as much as possible to study; she was holding him above her head or against her chest; she raised one leg as much as she could; she relaxed the other with her knee bent; she shook her head from side to side, and closed her eyes, as if she were sleeping a deep sleep. She could also get on her knees, like a cat ready to jump, ”he says.
"There are always two versions of the same story," the actress usually acknowledged. Between capture and capture on Santa Monica Beach in 1962, shortly before her inert body was found, Marilyn Monroe undressed her soul with Barris. The enigmas that she never wanted to reveal, screamed by themselves before the camera. This is me, no freckles or anything; the real me ", she said when reviewing the snapshots. She was never able to keep secrets from photographers.
She, who had become used to playing other characters and forgetting them at the end of the film, could not do the same with her life; she always exposed, persecuted. «Her face has an indefinite age and she reminds me of the ba**e foot countess. She hated to wear shoes, and her golden bangs constantly fell over her right eye. Even at thirty-six, she looked and acted like a teenager, "recalled Barris, perhaps one of the last to speak to the actress.
When you are older ...
After her death, the camera kept looking for her. But, after that August 5, 1962, she never found her again. Her audience, who raised her up when no one dared to see beyond the surface, and her closest friends of hers, could never forget bittersweet Marilyn Monroe. Her iron determination prevented Ella Fitzgerald from suffering the racial discrimination that prevailed at the time, and the jazz singer, after her death, recognized that she was "a very special woman and ahead of her time, only that she didn't know.
Truman Capote, a partner in the fatigue of those starlets in which the actress always tried not to become, said goodbye to her friend as best she knew, with words. The writer dedicated one of the stories in "Music for Chameleons" to her, in which she echoes a conversation with Miss Collier, one of her patrons: "She is not an actress at all, in the traditional sense . What she has, that presence, that luminosity, that dazzling intelligence, she could never come out on stage. It is something so fragile, so subtle, that only the camera can capture it. She is like a hummingbird in flight: only the camera can freeze her poetry. Capote always hid when she asked him how he would describe her. He preferred not to fall for the stormy Marilyn. But he ended up giving in, trapped by her magnetism.
- Marilyn: How would you answer that question? (His tone of hers was playful, teasing, and yet sincere at the same time: she wanted an honest answer.) Bet you would say she was a hick.
- Capote: Of course, but would you also tell them?
(The light was already going out. She seemed to fade with clarity, blend in with the sky and clouds, recede and hide behind. I wanted to raise my voice above the cries of the seagulls and ask her, "Marilyn, Marilyn, why? did it all have to turn out like this? Why is this life shit? ")
- Capote: I would say?
- Marilyn: I can't hear you.
- Capote: I would say that you are a beautiful girl.
