Breukelen Mama

March 27, 2012

My Marilyn obsession. It’s so trite. So TYPICAL of a girl like me. A girlie girl. A make-up girl. It’s like having a Bettie Page obsession if you’re a rockabilly chick. Or a Meagan Fox addiction if you’re lame. Meagan Fox has a Marilyn tattoo on her forearm: this is part of my shame!!! It’s not exactly “cool” to love Marilyn: but in reality, who DOESN’T love her?!? And if you do not, you’re probably a lying hipster, being an irrepressible iconoclast or have that annoying thing where you just disagree with the obvious to be an asshole in life to everyone who you think is less cool than you are, which is everyone but you.

My Marilyn obsession began at age 6. I pulled a book off my Nana’s bookshelf and brought it to bed. I still can’t go to sleep without reading before bed. It was Lena Pepitone’s memoir of her time as Marilyn’s maid “Marilyn Monroe Confidential, An Intimate and Personal Account.” It was juicy. Especially for a six year old! Lena graphically described Marilyn’s penchant for sleeping in the nude EVEN when she was menstruating (I ran to my dictionary to look up the word breathlessly, I thought it was something waaaay sexier). She only slept on white silk sheets. She was kind. She cried a LOT. She fought with her husbands, screaming, cheating, behaving terribly. She had a weird relationship with her acting teacher, a woman (clutch the pearls!) She wanted to be loved. So desperately. She didn’t have a Dad, either. I identified with Marilyn (yeah, at age six…I AM a Capricorn, we’re old souls and age backwards, true story.) At the core of it, Marilyn was just a little girl who felt alienated, alone and abandoned. I felt all those things, too. If only I could grow up to be pretty like her, well, then it wouldn’t matter, right?

From there on out I sought all Marilyn paraphernalia and ephemera.

For those who do not love Marilyn, I cannot ken your absence of it. Because Marilyn was lovely. Marilyn’s life was everything you want in a movie star: awful childhood, worked her way up through strife and peril of old Hollywood, mega-stardom, marriages to remarkable men and subsequent devastating divorces, breakdowns, pills, booze, more breakdowns, Daddy issues, affairs with important men the world over, screwing the President AND his brother: c’mon she had the whole “star” thing DOWN. And her beauty, although altered by the patriarchal Hollywood “system” of that era was never less than stunning. She, from birth (as evidenced here in this photo compendium) was simply breathtakingly, heart wrenchingly and preternaturally beautiful.

And you know what else? She was SMART. Really, really fucking smart. She read books most of us pretend to read. Then she read them again. She ate books like Plath ate men, like air. She hated her image as a dumb blonde but also was smart enough to embrace it; she had so little expected of her she could float and use her intelligence when it served her.

“When it comes down to it, I let them think what they want…if they care enough to bother with what I do, then I’m already better than them.”-MM

(Source: facebook.com, via fuckyeahmarilynmonroe)

8:51am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZjgdmxIeUcm4
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