Marilyn Monroe: Miss understood

Vixen or victim? Little girl lost or sex kitten? Icon or anachronism? It's ironic that it is only now, as we're approaching the 50th anniversary of her death, next year, that Marilyn Monroe has achieved the sense of seriousness – or at least serious discussion – she so desperately craved while alive.

Every tiny detail of her career and personal life – imagined or otherwise – is still picked over and we, the public – many of whom weren't even alive when The Seven Year Itch and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Misfits were on the big screen – continue to lap it all up with our voracious appetites for all things celebrity. Next month, the UK film My Week with Marilyn, starring Michelle Williams, is due for release. Prints from the then model's first photo shoot, taken in 1946, when she was still plain old Norma Jeane Dougherty, with mousy brown hair, bushy eyebrows and a killer pout, are to be auctioned off in California in December to pay the photographer's debts.

And next month Canongate publishes Marilyn's Last Sessions, a novel by Michel Shneider, based on the almost daily meetings between the troubled actress and her psychoanalyst, friend and confessor Dr Ralph Greenson. “This is the story of the world's most famous and elusive actress, and the world she inhabited," goes the blurb. “It is a remarkable piece of storytelling that illuminates one of the greatest icons of the 20th century."

But Schneider's motivation and inspiration came not from a fascination with the Hollywood star but, rather, from his own background in pschyoanalysis. “Marilyn had, during her life, four analysts, including Anna Freud," explains Shneider from his home in Paris, "and so she spent about half her adult life in various cures. Greenson was the last one, and he was the last person to have seen Marilyn alive and the last to have seen her dead."

The book combines factual detail – dates, places, etc – with the author's take on what might have gone on behind the analyst's closed doors – the thoughts, dreams, attitudes, dialogue. “Greenson was a great authority on the technique and practice of psychoanalysis," he says.

“He was the author of a sort of bible on the subject. Then, when I was in the process of writing a documentary about psychoanalysis and movies, I ran into this very strange story between Marilyn and Greenson, and was surprised to see that Greenson was doing exactly what he told his pupils not to do, in becoming too close to his patient. Each of them was not mad at the beginning, but the encounter produced a kind of folie a deux – a kind of psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are transmitted from one to another. The relationship was self-destructive for both of them.

“I wasn't specially interested in the actress when I started," he adds, “but I discovered quite another Marilyn in the process. She was not the dumb blonde; she was intelligent, though not particularly literate – she stopped school at 15 – but she loved writing, she loved words, she wrote beautiful poems and notes and she was a great reader. Difficult books. On set she was not reading women's magazines, she was reading Freud or Tolstoy or Joyce."

Ultimately, he says, the real theme of his novel, the real drama, is not the encounter between two people from very different worlds. “It is the difficulty for Marilyn to not be caught in the image that had been drawn for her. There is a conflict between words and images for both characters. He was a man of words and became a man of image, and she was a woman of image and became a woman of words."

And is she now taken more seriously as a result? “I hope so," says Schneider. “And I hope I contributed to this. She is no longer only a sex icon or symbol. I hope people will consider next year, when we'll be at the 50th anniersary of her death, that she was not only a nice girl but also a beautiful and intelligent woman."

MARILYN would have been 85 had she not killed herself from an overdose of barbiturates on 5 August 1962. In the space of a 15-year career, she had racked up an impressive 29 films and was in the process of filming her 30th (ironically named Something's Got to Give) when she died. But, to her eternal frustration, she was invariably typecast as the dumb, kooky blonde, with that platinum mane, those dare-you-to-touch-me dresses and that cute boo-boo-be-doo voice. She was about as far removed from a feminist icon as it's possible to get. But more recently she has been embraced by the feminist movement as one of their own. Gloria Steinem has said, “Her experiences were ones that feminism often speaks out on: sexual abuse, sexual victimisation, a mother's madness. She died just before the beginning of the modern women's movement. Her experiences were so typical and exaggerated, in terms of what happens to women who are abused as little girls, then treated as objects."

But the argument shouldn't perhaps be whether she is an antiquated image of femininity or an icon worthy of celebration, but why it must be either/or. “The idea that there is a ‘right' and ‘wrong' image of women (and men) is very limiting, and has proved oppressing to all kinds of people," says Lena Wånggren, a research fellow in the department of English literature at Edinburgh University.

“I think we might gain more from discussing the various presentations (rather than representations) of gender than figuring out if any woman is a ‘good' image. Gender is obviously a social construct – we see this in the various changing ideas throughout history of what is seen as masculine or feminine.

“In a sense, Marilyn Monroe as a typical 1950s pin-up icon very much demonstrates this constructedness – historical and social – of gender, in that she is obviously performing a specific kind of femininity, be it antiquated or not, just as we all perform (or conform) to different ideas of what a woman or a man (or other genders) should be like. This might actually be why many young feminists today feel attracted to such female icons, because of these icons' blatant faking it."

Still, that vision of femininity – the killer curves, the full-on Hollywood glamour – is a timeless one, and one many women still aspire to (and men still fall for). Liz Hurley may have said, “I'd kill myself if I was as fat as Marilyn Monroe" – neatly earning a retort from US actress Claudia Shear, who said, "Most of us would kill ourselves if we were as talent-free as Elizabeth Hurley" – but others are a lot less scathing. “She's not the most beautiful person who lived," says Beauty Bombshells blogger Merle Brown, whose Little Book of Shocking Beauty Facts is out next year. “But I think people see her beauty as achievable.

“She was curvy, she was flawed – physically and mentally. Everyone knew her hair was dyed. These days it's almost impossible to achieve a Jennifer Aniston look, for instance, but you can achieve a Marilyn with the right clothes, the right underwear, the right make-up."

A large part of the appeal, of course, is that she died young. “If you look at Elvis, if you look at James Dean – he had one film out before he died and yet he is the male equivalent of Marilyn Monroe," says Brown. “For me, when I was young, they were the two people I idolised. I didn't really know the films at that point, I just liked the visual image."

Perhaps part of the appeal is that, like Mad Men and its ilk, it harks back to a more feminine time; a time when women didn't feel they had to act like men to have their voices heard. “These days we don't embrace our femininity, says Brown.

“I don't see that, to be a feminist, you can't discuss the feminine. You can watch Marilyn Monroe and enjoy the clothes and the era and her great acting ability. Because she was a really good actress."

So – icon or anachronim? She's probably a bit of both. “Women these days want to be how Marilyn should have been," says Brown. “The strong Marilyn. They aspire to that glamour but want that glamour on their terms."

• Marilyn’s Last Sessions, by Michel Shneider, £16.99, is published by Canongate on 3 November; My Week with Marilyn is on general release on 25 November