I just wanna be loved by you

Published on Saturday 19 July 2003 01:00

HOW do you deal with Marilyn? What do you even call her? There is a certain type of cineaste, all Sight And Sound subscription and nouvelle vague retrospectives, who might try to say ‘Monroe’, in an affected kind of way, but for most of us, Marilyn will do.

She is shorthand for a kind of mid-20th-century American zenith, when Hollywood was still culturally serious, when the brashness of our transatlantic cousins was still winningly gauche rather than sinisterly triumphalist. She was every kind of 1950s American idol, a queen in the movie milieu of Mulholland Drive, the bohemian set of downtown Manhattan, and in every soda fountain and dime store across the Midwest. Hardly surprising, then, if four decades after her death every faux-American diner from Queensland to Qatar reaches for the archetypal curvaceous blonde when it comes to dcor, a fast-track to a certain kind of timeless Americana.

Marilyn was the starlet who escaped her chosen genre, probably fortuitously, because you would have to indulge a degree of generosity to make a case for her films being works of artistic genius. Instead, for the vast majority of us, who aren’t cinephiles, who aren’t liable to indulge in camp orgies of cooing and cackling at Some Like It Hot or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, our conceptions of Marilyn have been formed by the stills camera as much as the movie lens.

You could make a case that the moody picture session George Zimbel captured on the set of The Seven Year Itch did far more for her stellar longevity than the fluff of the film itself. The legend has been printed so effectively that occasionally, when you watch one of her films, she can seem a little diminished, by having to speak and act and move and interact with a bunch of ugly screen-hoggers, like any other jobbing mortal - instead of staring frozen, alone, from her framed pantheon.

Now, 40 years after her last film, the suspicion is that print was her true medium, the temporal flash of the still camera’s frame her best form of expression. Her iconography comes from the photos, and the occasional Andy Warhol silkscreen, the images that made her globally recognisable well beyond the reach of cinema.

This collection of rare Marilyn portraits, in a touring exhibition from the Andrew Weiss Gallery in Los Angeles, may not quite pin and mount her like a butterfly, but it serves as a chastening reminder of an era when celebrity photography wasn’t such a dismal pursuit.

The title of the exhibition, Timeless Beauty, sounds a little like the product of an advertising creative’s post-lunch brainstorming session, and doesn’t quite get the point. Marilyn’s beauty is distinctly non-timeless, quite anachronistic in our era of Slavic cheekbones and waif chic, and hardly the full secret of her mysterious charisma.

The question is, how can merely being photogenic exert such a power? A lot of it is to do with the period, to an era when commerce, while plenty cynical, wasn’t quite so overbearing as to have created a correspondent consumer resistance. More importantly, it was an age when the delineation between the young and the adult was firmly established. Marilyn was always for grown-ups.

Comparing past and present is an exercise in futility, but appreciating the seismic visual impact of these old photographs of a long-dead actress of limited thespian ability, compared to the wearisome hype of the modern film industry, is an instructive crash-course in how the cult of youth diminished the real potency of popular culture and forced out all discretion, wit and understatement.

Every other city bus right now is carrying a flashy image of Lucy Liu; a still from the latest Charlie’s Angels barrel-scrape, featuring the actress in provocative attire, blasting an unseen adversary with a flame-thrower.

Putting aside any quaint qualms we might have about violent incineration now being accepted as sexy, the imagery is a compliant acceptance of the truth about modern movie stars. Action is everything, pointless violence a vital ingredient in any modern characterisation (if that’s not too generous a description for the stereotyped sketches Hollywood writers foist on us).

The adolescent imagination’s preferred currency is the hard cash of obviousness. Symbolism cannot deliver over the counter. If you have a beautiful actress, then you really have to put her in a bikini, give her a gun, and make her look simultaneously menacing and alluring. The disingenuous and the self-deluding even have the gall to claim it is some post-feminist statement of empowerment, to have women in their underwear strutting around with weaponry. Even if you believe that, it’s impossible to conceive of any theory that would make a picture of, say, Demi Moore, have a fraction of the artistic power of one of these Marilyn portraits.

The difference is about age. Marilyn was the last star for whom the youth audience didn’t matter, the last great female screen presence pitched at adults. The familiar biographical details tell us of a life punctuated by unhappy accident, but if Marilyn had been born into a more mediated age, when lives are arranged by PR professionals, you wonder whether they could have made a better job of it.

Think about it. Just the marriages. To Joe Di Maggio, America’s favourite sporting genius, then to Arthur Miller, the east coast crew’s leading critic of post-war American paranoia. These days, that would be seen as a triumphant cornering of the blue-collar market, followed by a swift colonisation of the ABC1 intellectuals. Marilyn, poor girl, just thought it was falling in love.

The most guileless pictures in the exhibition were taken by a Japanese Pan Am airline steward, Kashio Aoki, of Marilyn and Di Maggio as they landed in Tokyo in February 1954, on honeymoon. Marilyn’s flashbulb grin has an unfamiliar fondness about it, Di Maggio’s the broad disbelief of a man who knows he is the envy of the western world - and right at that moment, the eastern one as well. Two weeks later, when the newlyweds were leaving, Aoki presented them with the developed photographs, which have the sort of honesty a million paparazzi shots couldn’t even approximate.

The rest of the exhibition, with works by Andre De Dienes, Lazlo Willinger, George Barris and Milton Greene among them, are effective encapsulations of the ages of Marilyn, from callow cheesecake model, through hopeful wife and nervous star, to tragic heroine falling out of the Hollywood firmament.

In their chronology, they start and finish with sex - although, of course, it’s a ubiquitous ingredient in everything in between. The first the media world saw of Norma Jean Baker turning into Marilyn Monroe came in Tom Kelley’s nude pin-up shots from 1949, later reprinted for the 1952 launch issue of Playboy. If there is such a possibility as pornographic innocence, it is present here. The backdrop of lush folds of red velvet - all soft, fleshy crimson curves and shadowy clefts - now seems to have so much Freudian obviousness that even the lads’ mags would eschew it as a touch tacky, but half a century ago it must have seemed provocatively bohemian, classy even. Marilyn’s thrown-back head, half-open mouth and erotic stare were to be parodied, corrupted in a million porn-mag centrefolds, but the 1949 version still carries a degree of original sin about it - the sort of iconic obliviousness that Warhol would recognise a couple of decades later. This is cheap Americana made timeless; sex, colour and a certain greed for fame captured in a still in a way that Marilyn never managed as vividly on celluloid.

A short, if eventful, 13 years later, we have candid photographs from the three-day shoot now known as The Last Sitting, taken by the fashion photographer Bert Stern six weeks before Marilyn’s death in 1962.

Through the lens of omniscient hindsight, they can seem a fragile last attempt at image manipulation, a wearisome clinging to sex appeal, with the crumpled sheets, the soft pillows, the glass of champagne.

Four of Stern’s photographs are untreated one-offs that show Marilyn’s wrinkles and facial hair. Unthinkable that they should be shown at the time, but now the details key into another posthumous image. This is the Marilyn/Norma Jean of the cloyingly inquisitive biographers, and those fans of a quasi-necrophiliac bent who took as their starting point the mawkish words of Candle In The Wind - a song that writers Elton John and Bernie Taupin obviously felt so sensitive about, they were prepared to fillet the lyric and apply it to another doomed blonde.

That was a peculiarly misguided notion; to think that Marilyn had a connection with any other female, anyone who went before or followed in her wake. Half a glimpse at any of these pictures tells you she was an inimitable original, and such an instant retro-advertisement for a lost, idealistic America that they should put her on the currency. On a new five-dollar bill perhaps; cheap, but not the cheapest, the stuff of everyday enjoyment. Except that it might destroy their economy, as Americans refuse to part with her.

• Timeless Beauty, The Dome, Edinburgh, 23-26 July, 12pm-10pm. Admission free.