A new Marilyn Monroe exhibit and auction will include outfits that belonged to the blonde bombshell including a replica of her iconic Seven Year Itch dress. Beginning August 18, The Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills will display a collection of Marilyn Monroe's costumes and artifacts until September 30, which precedes an October auction of the items. Pieces displayed throughout "Essentially Marilyn: The Auction/The Exhibit" will be complemented by photographs taken by photographer Milton H. Greene, who was also Monroe's friend. The items on display include 15 costumes worn by Marilyn Monroe including the sequined showgirl leotard style from "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. At the end of October, Profiles in History will host an auction of the items, but a date has not yet been announced." Source: www.apparelnews.net
“The greatest thing about Monroe is not her chest,” Billy Wilder declared with sincerity. “It is her ear. She is a master of delivery. She can read comedy better than anyone else in the world.” For many, Marilyn Monroe will always be the girl on the sidewalk grating; her skirt blowing up around her waist. For others she is the woman breathily singing her way through Happy Birthday for President John F Kennedy. In reality, however, she was neither. In fact it could be said that Marilyn Monroe wasn’t even a real person; she was a fascinating character created by Norma Jeane Baker, the little girl who dreamed of becoming a movie star. Marilyn was an invention in which she herself didn't believe. By 1933 Gladys Baker decided to move Norma Jeane into a house she was sharing with Mr and Mrs Atkinson, an English couple who worked in the movies. Shortly after moving in together, news came through that Gladys’ grandfather Tilford Hogan had committed suicide, and her son had died tragically at 14. Gladys had always been emotional and these two events were enough to push her over the edge. Shortly afterwards Gladys suffered a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
In 1942, when faced with yet another stint in an orphanage, Norma Jeane married Jim Dougherty, a neighbour of the Goddard family, where she was living at the time. For Jim, it was a chance to ‘save’ her; he could be a knight in shining armour and he embraced the challenge wholeheartedly, though Norma Jeane was conflicted. “It was like being retired to a zoo,” she later said. The marriage lasted four years, during which time Jim went to war and Norma Jeane moved in with her in-laws. She was bored and lonely, so took a job at a defence plant, where she was discovered by a photographer taking photos for the war effort. These photographs led to a modelling career and Jim went along with it, giving her all of his savings for her customes and fees, though assured his wife that when he returned from war, she’d have to give it all up and start a family. She responded by heading to Las Vegas and filing for divorce; much to the shock and despair of her husband. Johnny Hyde, a prominent Hollywood agent, put her forward for the small but important role of Angela in The Asphalt Jungle, directed by John Huston. Hyde asked her many times to marry him and she turned him down each and every time. After Johnny Hyde’s death, Marilyn channelled everything into her career, earning roles in films such as Love Nest, Clash By Night and Don’t Bother To Knock.
Marilyn's star was on the rise, and yet it all threatened to come crashing down with the discovery not only that she had posed nude, but that her mother, whom she had been declaring dead for years, was actually alive and living in an institution. Many theories have been brought forward over the years as to why or how Marilyn died. Though Dr. Ralph Greenson acknowledged that ‘all their sessions had been like acts in a play,’ he seemed unsure of its meaning. ‘The curtain had fallen, and the enigma of Marilyn's self was intact.’ He realised that she ‘revealed herself only to mask herself again.’ Greenson was haunted by the memory of Marilyn and devastated by his failure to rescue her. "It was ‘a marriage of intellect and artifice’that ‘came to an end when Hollywood itself did." Monroe’s decline coincided with the demise of the studio system which she had grown to bloom. She took her secrets to the grave, and any stories of her death that have come and gone through the years can only be speculative at best. Each question invites further answers, on and on, like an endless hall of mirrors. —"The Shocking Truth Behind Marilyn Monroe's Secret Life" (2015) by Michelle Morgan
Kelli Garner is the latest actress to tackle an impossible role — the screen legend Marilyn Monroe, whose dumb-blonde persona masked a dark personality haunted by mental illness. Sometimes Garner's performance doesn’t work at critical times because it lacks sufficient nuance. Vocally, Garner goes for mannered breathiness punctuated with a bubbly giggle. The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe is based on the biography of the same name by J. Randy Tarraborelli, although the book was written off by some critics as being little more than vapid gossip about the late actress. And that's one of the problems with creating yet another book, movie, or TV show about Monroe. Since Monroe's untimely death at the age of 36 on Aug. 5, 1962, she has taken on a larger-than-life, mythic quality that makes it difficult to know what is fact and what has just been repeated as part of her legend for years. The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe suggests that mental illness ran in Monroe's family. Just as her mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, Monroe also deals with bouts of paranoia, delusion, and depression. Hollywood, then, provides the perfect escape from a miserable reality. One screen test revealed what we all know now: the camera loved Marilyn Monroe and she loved the camera, giving herself to it as she never could to any husband or lover. In one scene the mother-daughter duo are on the same page: when Norma Jeane asks Gladys at what age she began to hear the voices, Gladys gives her a knowing look and says, “So you’re hearing them too?” At least Gladys realized she was better off under a doctor’s care.
A printed epilogue notes that Gladys ended up outliving her daughter by 22 years. In the series, things got so bad that Monroe almost tried to kill herself by jumping out of a window, which eventually caused her therapist Dr. Kris to admit her to a psychiatric hospital. In the 2001 documentary Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days, Dr. Kris says Monroe got into the psychiatric ward at Payne Whitney in 1961, with a doctor forcing a physical exam on her and Monroe threatening to cut herself with glass if she wasn't released. “The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe” takes a compassionate look at a star whose beauty made her a legend, but whose private life was a torture chamber. Monroe was in many ways unknowable and you'll come to the sad realization that you'll never come to truly know her either, which is what Monroe wanted the most. Marilyn Monroe, as Joshua Logan said, "is pure cinema." Source: www.sfgate.com
It takes more than a breathy voice and a golden dye job to play Marilyn Monroe, the most celebrated and troubled of Hollywood idols. Kelli Garner certainly throws herself into the title role of Lifetime’s two-night miniseries The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe, adapted from the 2009 biography of the same name by J. Randy Taraborrelli. Yet she never seems to be doing anything more than celebrity karaoke, rarely digging deep beneath the long succession of hairstyles and form-fitting clothes. As for John F. Kennedy, that’s included too, but the senator-turned-President remains discretely off-screen, although there’s still an excuse to show Garner in the knockout gossamer dress Monroe famously wore when she sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” Underlying it all, in the adapted screenplay by Stephen Kronish, directed by Laurie Collyer, is that Monroe inherited mental illness from her mother, a religious scold (she calls modeling “a sinful business”) who hears voices. Marilyn, as usual, is portrayed as an object mostly of pity, someone who tells her agent, “Everyone uses everyone,” having been on both sides of the equation. Source: variety.com
No comments :
Post a Comment