Aubrey Malone
The biggest film date of the year is coming up. It’s June 1, the centenary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth. A hundred years on we’re still talking about her, watching her films, seeing documentaries about her on TV and discussing in bars and homes whether she was a good actress or just chewing gum for the eyes.
To commemorate the occasion, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in Dublin is presenting ‘Marilyn Monroe 100’ at the National Concert Hall on June 4, featuring music from her films. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles is exhibiting costumes and rare personal items from May 31 to February 28, 2027. Also in L.A. there’s ‘Marilyn: The Immersive Experience,’ a multi-sensory interactive exhibit that has never-before-seen photographs of her and personal memorabilia.
For ten years, she was Twentieth Century Fox’s most prized acquisition, whether she was singing, dancing, falling in love or playing the dumb blonde roles she came to despise so much. She did her best to break out of these when she joined the Actors Studio and set up her own production company.
She gave serious performances in films like Bus Stop and The Misfits, but after reverting to her screwball personality in Some Like It Hot, it seemed she was forever going to be straitjacketed within Tinseltown’s one-dimensional image of her. Clive James wrote, “She’s good at playing abstract confusion in the same way a midget is good at being short.” An executive at Columbia added, “She’s unable to take refuge even in her own insignificance.”
I wrote a book to coincide with the centenary. The Marilyn Diaries is published by Casa Carlini. It’s a semi-fictional set of diary entries written in the way I think she would have done had she lived longer. She did write a diary once with Ben Hecht, but it was insignificant. I try to capture the person Hollywood never allowed her to be.
Marilyn could have been saved if she became a mother. When the men in her life departed, she had nothing left to hold onto. She became pregnant many times but all the pregnancies resulted in miscarriages. She felt this was God punishing her for abortions she’d had in the early days of her career. It was common practice for studios to ‘arrange’ these procedures for stars so as not to ‘inconvenience’ their careers. Often, they weren’t given a choice.
Marilyn once said of Hollywood, “They give you $10,000 for a kiss and ten cents for your soul.” She felt she held out for the money once too often. This year, let’s remember her as one of the film industry’s most tragic figures, a woman who failed to overcome the demons of her youth after fame hit.
“Goodbye Norma Jean,” sang Elton John, referencing her birth name. For her time in the celluloid sun she became Marilyn Monroe but the ghost of Norma Jean never left her. May she rest in peace.