Searching for Norma Jeane

Marilyn: Norma Jeane

text by Gloria Steinam

photos by George Barris

Henry Holt Co.; pp.182; $24.95.

WHEN BRITISH WRITER Anthony Summers called his 1985 biography of Marilyn Monroe Goddess, the title was probably more aptly ironic than he realized. For if a goddess is beautiful, enchanting and powerful, she is also, above all, immortal. Monroe's mortality, on the other hand, became all too apparent when she died of an overdose 25 years ago.

But Marilyn is one Hollywood Venus whose memory--and marketability--is eternal. While no one has gone so far as to disinter Monroe's body, the media, the fans, the flesh mongers and the merely curious will not let her rest in peace. When the new Madonna pumped her muscles and pumped some life into the old Marilyn image, both Vanity Fair and Life gave it cover story coverage. In Paris, where Americanisms are snubbed and snuggled at once, there is an entire store devoted to Marilynobilia. Noting the phenomenon, Time Magazine voted Marilyn the Liveliest Spirit of 1986.

While the living Marilyn was all things to all men, her corpse has taken on its strangest incarnation of all as a feminist icon. It all started in 1972 when Gloria Steinem wrote an essay on Marilyn Monroe for Ms. Magazine. The piece portrayed Monroe as a pre-feminist victim of male exploitation. Appropriately titled "The Woman Who Died Too Soon," it was later anthologized in Steinem's book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. It has now become the basis for her latest work.

MARILYN: NORMA JEANE, which is half Steinem's text and half photographs by George Barris, is both an earnest revisionist history and a coffee-table decoration wrapped in one glossy volume. Steinem attempts to debunk the endless, and accumulating, Marilyn myths and cast Monroe in a role more realistic than diamond-digger Lorelei Lee could ever be for her.

We see a woman proud of never having been "kept" by a man, and we see a woman excessively proud of the swimming pool in back of the Los Angeles home she purchased with her own earnings, the house in which she was to die alone. We also see a woman who was no stranger to the casting couch, who occasionally prostituted herself to earn money during her days as a budding starlet and who had more abortions, at least a dozen, than she did orgasms, probably none.

Since Barris took the last photographs of Monroe before her death as part of a collaborative autobiographical effort with the star, Steinem has some previously undisclosed interviews to draw from. This is perhaps the most valuable part of the work. Steinem often lets Monroe speak for herself, allowing us to see her as an articulate, thoughtful woman that the camera could only see as a dumb blonde.

Steinem's book also attempts to redress a sexist imbalance in the field of Marilyn mytho-biography. This is the first major book on the star written by a woman. "Nearly all of the journalistic eulogies that followed Monroe's death were written by men," Steinem writes. "So are almost all of the more than forty books that have been published about Monroe." Steinem devotes many pages to arguing with the male-written works, focusing particular attention and ire on Norman Mailer's famed bitch-goddess vision of Monroe that ignored her very human vulnerability.

Steinem also focuses on Monroe's biggest flaw and her ultimate downfall: her desperate need for love. Born illegitimate to an emotionally unstable mother who was to die in a mental institute, and later shuttled from foster homes to an arranged teenage marriage, Norma Jeane was to spend the rest of her life in search of the paternal love she never got. Steinem points a critical feminist finger at the Freudian psychoanalysts who could not help Monroe solve her problems because of the inherent sexism of Freud's theories. As a last resort, they prescribed pills, a move which proved lethal.

Marilyn: Norma Jeane does not, however, make the mistake of being merely a feminist interpretation of Monroe's life. Barris' photographs show us a playful woman who loved to drink champagne and run on the beach. The chapter titled "Fathers and Lovers" is a gossipy look at her love life, "The Woman Who Will Not Die" attempts to decipher the enduring mania for Marilyn, and "Who Would She Be Now?" offers a speculative look at what Monroe would be like if she were alive today.

And that, after all, is what our curiosity is all about. We know what Monroe was, but we wonder what she might have become. While Marilyn: Norma Jeane only perpetuates these useless questions, the answers it offers may help put them to rest.