Laura Puts Out...pictures, words, ideas: MARILYN'S MORTAL SIN

The painter Franz Klein once described Marilyn Monroe’s sexual luminosity as so compelling that, “You thought if you bit her, milk and honey would flow from her skin.” Her artistry was such that she could make any movement, any gesture almost insufferably suggestive.

IF SHE’D LIVED,

WE WOULD HAVE CRUCIFIED HER ANYWAY

Being that beautiful was enough. The problem with Marilyn was that she was so much more. To consider her as a woman far ahead of her time in terms of professional ambition, social activism, and self-tutoring was inconceivable and unpermissable. Beauty was enough power for one female. And in the minds of the studio system, the media, and the adoring public, the most effective way to restrict that power was to limit it. First worship it, then denigrate it. If you’re going to be beautiful, then you must also be dumb.

IN OUR CULTURE, NO SIN IS GREATER FOR A WOMAN THAN LOOKING OLD.

If persecuting Marilyn for her incomparable sexuality in youth were not enough, imagine the torment that would have been heaped upon her for the even more egregious sin, the most unforgivable of all -- age. This week Marilyn would have turned 88 years old, and if the ridicule lavished upon poor Kim Novak for attempting to rise to Hollywood’s cosmetic standards in her dotage were not cruel enough, consider how Marilyn, at this stage of life, would have been crucified. For in our culture, no sin is greater for a woman (except for perhaps murdering your children) than looking old.

I rather doubt that Marilyn would have submitted to the surgical grotesqueries of present day Hollywood. She used her beauty as a career-building tool in her ambition to become a serious actress. The only cosmetic change she ever underwent, at the urging of her agent Johnny Hyde, was the slight tweaking of her nose, and it was, in fact, a harmonious – and courageous -- refinement. Imagine the surgical risk she was taking in those days before cosmetic procedures were either common or medically sound. But as in every aspect of her life, Marilyn was willing to risk all to achieve her ambition.

Her body was made to covey pleasure, and she took no shame in her natural luscious magnetism, despite even the lifelong abuses she had suffered because of it. Many of her physical gifts were the result of hard won anatomical command, having trained herself to suggest character with movement and the organization of her supple frame. Naturally athletic, she understood instinctively how to use her attributes. As a teenage bride, she had taken lessons in bodybuilding from an Olympic trainer on Catalina Beach. Years later she sought ways of accentuating and projecting her physical presence by studying human bone and muscle structure. Throughout her career, she spent hours in front of a mirror practicing at walking, gesturing, and controlling her facial muscles.

Her determination extended to creative control over her work, an effort that was revolutionary for the time and made her the only star to have taken on the moguls and won. She was also only the second woman (Mary Pickford was the first) to head her own production company (her partner was the photographer Milton Greene. Marilyn made certain she controlled 51 per cent of the stock.) Marilyn’s successful negotiation of the Twentieth Century Fox contract was one of the greatest single triumphs over a studio ever won by an actress. “I’ll never tie myself to a studio again,” she said. “I’d rather retire.”

Entirely self-educated, Marilyn was a voracious reader of non-fiction and philosophy, being as intent on developing her mind as her body. The feminist scholar Jacqueline Rose has written that, “To read Monroe's fragments, letters, journals and poems is to realise that, however tormented, she had another life. It is to be struck by the unrelenting mental energy with which she confronted herself.”

While it is abundantly clear how greatly she enjoyed the spotlight, she allowed herself to become a spectacle of desire essentially because it served her ambition. Had she remained healthy and been able to anticipate serious roles in her future, she might have determined to maintain her acting career. But even though she was still luscious, she was growing ever more difficult, and who wants to bother with a difficult woman?

Eventually, she might have left Hollywood to pursue her devotions and lend herself to the causes that lay at her heart: the welfare of children and animals, civil rights, and progressive politics: She was, after all, a devoted student of the writings of Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln Steffans, friends with Carl Sandberg, Elia Kazan, Ella Fitzgerald and the black actresses Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge, the wife and muse of playwright Arthur Miller, and the lover of a Democratic president.

Actions on behalf of her causes were what Marilyn considered the only advantages to her tragic personal history. ”There were no benefits except what it could teach me about the basic needs of the young, the sick and the weak,” she said. “I have great feeling for all the persecuted ones in the world.” Arthur Miller concurred. “Marilyn understood and wanted desperately to please her audience…the most ordinary layer of the audience, the working people, the guys in the bars, the housewives in the trailers bedeviled by unpaid bills, the high school kids mystified by explanations they could not understand, the ignorant and – as she saw them – tricked and manipulated masses. She wanted them to feel they’d got their money’s worth when they saw a picture of hers.”

From the beginning, Marilyn grasped the certain knowledge that she had only herself to rely on, and early on had looked for answers and understanding in religion, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. At the age of 18, she became a Christian Scientist; in her twenties, she studied Anthroposophy, the highly progressive philosophy espoused by Rudolf Steiner; she spent years subjecting herself to the often brutal work of psychoanalysis. Before her marriage to Arthur Miller, she converted, of her own volition, to Judaism. The mental energy with which she confronted herself was unrelenting.

Not one of these qualities and dimensions of Marilyn Monroe’s life could even begin to compensate for the sin of aging that she would have committed had she lived. Unforgivable, irredeemable, especially in an icon of female sexuality. The patriarchy would refuse to allow her to be anything other than her young, luminous self, and her sin, therefore, is a mortal one.

So who might a Marilyn withdrawn from the unforgiving media glare have turned out to be? A Catherine Deneuve or Jeanne Moreau or Sophia Loren or a Gina Lollobrigida living a life of sanctuary and grace? Europe, literary and discreet, likely would have been a good place for her. But I think Marilyn would have chosen a life more like that of Bridget Bardot who turned her back on the slobbering burdens of youth and sexiness to become a full-time advocate for her own passions (saving near-extinct wild animal species and neglected and abandoned dogs).

Likely, Marilyn would have sought out a spiritual teacher and let her heart do the rest. For in a brief 36 years, she lived an indisputably mythic life. Indeed, she might herself have become a mystic. But even if the Kennedys – or whoever – hadn’t assassinated her, the patriarchy would have crucified her, an aging female immortal, anyway.