She was a just postcard at the MOMA, a stamp of pink and lemon yellow. Her mouth, a red smear, slightly open. Is that a word forming, wanting to slip from tongue to lip to air. Trapped in an Andy Warhol silk screen.
I bought the postcard, propped it on my desk. We gazed at each other.
What did I know about Marilyn Monroe—nothing really—blonde bombshell, actress, married to Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, something about the Kennedys, died young, suicide? She was just a very famous face. But arguably the first female celebrity known by a single name. And still the most enduring. Even 60 years after her death, she’s still here, on YouTube, all over the Internet, and at the moment, in the form of a controversial statue in Palm Springs.
Why is that?
Turns out Marilyn pioneered multiplication—And I don’t mean math, but the concept of blanketing the world with her image, before the Internet made it easy— she was the first instant celebrity, it gave her power. She created the Marilyn Monroe image then projected and performed it over and over.
Think about yourself. How do you appear on Instagram, Hinge or Twitter? Isn’t social a form of multiplication? Aren’t we all projecting and performing? Every selfie is posed and a pose. Even in real life, we perform some version of our self. I am now. So are you.
T.S. Eliot wrote about putting on a “face to meet the faces that you meet.” The daily act of assuming a persona. As a poet, to really explore our performance culture, I assumed someone else’s persona—Marilyn’s.
For two years, I became Marilyn in poetry. It began in Paris in July 2018. A place where I had first come as a student, even then assuming a role—dipping my tongue into the language to spend long nights in cafés and bars, drinking Pernod, smoking Gauloises and imagining myself Hemingway. But now, decades later, I had greater ambitions. I was going to become Marilyn Monroe. Or maybe it had started earlier, in 1994 when I moved to Los Angeles and fell under the spell of faces plastered on billboards and ran into stars in the supermarket. The glitter of LA shaking onto my skin and sticking as I went about my life, working, raising my family. But all the time, perhaps it was there lurking—the desire to be someone else, to be the world’s most famous woman, to be Marilyn Monroe.
As I wrote, I came to know her many faces, the layers of her performance. I stripped away the façade, pushed against stereotype to try to find her truth. I found it. Sort’ve. It was fairly easy for me to capture her voice, to tell her story in poetry. She has a lot to say and poetry works for Marilyn. But as I’ve came closer to Marilyn’s truths, I’ve came face to face with my self—Maybe I used her as a foil. By becoming Marilyn, had I been avoiding my own lies?
In the end, the collection I wrote, An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, is a poetic insomnia-inspired conversation between Marilyn and the speaker that confronts the truths that many women experience: abuse, addiction, careers, love, marriage and divorce, children and childlessness, mental health and death. In becoming Marilyn, I became closer to understanding myself.
Thank you for a tremendous week of posts about an endlessly fascinating figure.
(BTW I watched a documentary recently about Sam Giancana, head of the mob in the 1960s, and the speculation among the mafiosi is that RFK had MM killed.) -- DL
Posted by: David Lehman | June 04, 2021 at 01:36 PM
Thank YOU for the invitation to write a week of Marilyn in Poetry from all angles. We'll never know...but having spent two years deeply engaged in researching and understanding her, I have my doubts that it was anything more than an overdose. And that her psychiatrists were the real villains in this sad story. HS
Posted by: Heidi A Seaborn | June 05, 2021 at 01:34 PM