A FANTASTIC WOMAN
by Christina Catherine Martinez
An exhibition at the Academy Museum attempts to examine the life and work of Marilyn Monroe. (Emily Shur)
Marilyn Monroe used to scare me. My first encounter with her was in Rocky Cola Cafe, a 1950s-themed diner in my hometown of Whittier with red vinyl booths and servers in little dresses and bouncy ponytails. I spent formative high school years there, sipping chocolate soda after late-night rehearsals (I was a theater kid) and weekend breakups (I dated other theater kids). Marilyn watched over me in the form of a poster that hung near the women’s restroom, where I often excused myself to cry. The poster was the iconic publicity image from the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn crouched above a New York subway grate, the pleats of her dress flying up around her like a seashell. She looks just over your shoulder, hand to her ear, like someone behind you just said something interesting. Her watching over me, or just past me, added to my adolescent alienation, and I hated her and the neon tubing frame she came with. I wanted to be an “actress.” But I also loved books, which I assumed was not a thing people who looked like her did. Where did I learn that? The gulf between me and the woman in the poster was too much to bear. I actively avoided watching her films for years.
That photograph is on display in Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon, currently on view at the Academy Museum, which does a curious job of flattening the legacy of an actor whose life and work becomes more complex when you bother to look. The show promises to offer “unique insight into her agency in becoming a Hollywood icon” but looks away from all the ways in which that agency was taken from her. It is worth visiting for the costumes alone — like the shocking pink dress she wore to sing Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, displayed in its own dimly-lit room complete with red velvet couches and heart-shaped pillows. But aside from that, the ephemera on display, including letters, contracts, portraits, and a tiny corner devoted to her difficult childhood as Norma Jeane Baker, can’t seem to decide if it wants to put on a happy face or risk implicating the industry that made and unmade her. To that end, I recommend some supplementary materials to add some depth to your enjoyment of the show.
The show features Monroe's iconic looks, including the dress from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. (Emily Shur)
What’s not in the exhibition, tellingly, are any images of Marilyn Monroe reading, images that crept up on me during the tender Tumblr era of the early aughts, a time in which many young women looked to alternate views of female icons as personal talismans for working out their own subjectivity. Marilyn with a giant copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses certainly went against type and presented the idea that maybe, maybe, I could be interested in books and still learn to blow-dry my hair. Marilyn walked so every smart, hot, funny girl could run, even if we’re running in circles.
Gail Crowther’s just-released Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe is a gossipy read that focuses on her lifelong bibliomania. While Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon houses a scant display of Monroe’s household items, including an ashtray and Mexican blankets, there is nothing of her personal collection of over 400 books that she hauled from home to home throughout her career. Crowther’s project details not just her involvement with literary figures, like her short marriage to Death of a Salesman author Arthur Miller, but attempts to create something like an intellectual portrait of Monroe, noting that the high-school dropout ended up studying world literature through UCLA’s extension program. Think of the book as a funhouse mirror for everything NOT addressed in Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of Norma Jean’s birth, and there’s a flurry of cultural phenomena to celebrate. But one of the best and most interesting examinations of her legacy is a 2006 episode of PBS’s American Masters titled Marilyn Monroe: Still Life. The interview with Gloria Steinem is a compressed masterclass in the complicated relationship between Marilyn and the oft-maligned sector of the Audience known as Women. In it, Steinem talks about the reaction to her pivotal 1972 essay, “The Woman Who Died Too Soon,” a revisionist take on the bombshell afterimage of Marilyn that created space for women to see themselves in her.
The exhibition features film ephemera, but not Monroe's book collection. (Emily Shur)
I did eventually become an actor. That the journey toward this dream involved a decade-long detour of writing as a critic says much about what women are encouraged to want, even as we are still exhorted to HAVE IT ALL. This dispatch is from a New York hotel room where I am currently ensconced between rehearsals. What I have found, in my double life as a writer and actor, is the former begets a kind of invisibility, while the latter is all about being visible, and it feels like my heart and brain are in a constant state of break.
An individual can hold many stories and perceptions at once. But The Audience has less of a capacity for nuance. And the bigger the audience, the narrower the channel of perception. This tension is the heart of what public-facing museums navigate with every show: Rigorous! But also accessible! One for the nerds! And the tourists! At the same time!
Celebrities deal with this tension on a deeply intimate level. The person who becomes an icon is often stuck in a state of arrested development in the eye of The Public that created them. As an exhibition that might offer a deeper look at a woman who lived and breathed and ultimately died under the weight of her own iconicity, Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon, does flop. But the icon is bigger than any show that fails her. And it is still worth going, to pay tribute, to dazzle at her pretty dresses and relics, to play our part as her still-dazzled audience.
💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽
Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon is on view through July 3rd at the Academy Museum; academymuseum.org.
Christina Catherine Martinez is a writer, actor, and artist in Los Angeles. She is the author of the book Aesthetical Relations.
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