Like with most of the men in her life, Marilyn Monroe had a complicated relationship with Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra. Following their divorces from Joe DiMaggio and Ava Gardner, Marilyn and Sinatra found consolation together and commiserated over their shared troubles with insomnia, loneliness and insecurity. “He has always been very kind to me,” Marilyn told gossip columnist Louella Parsons, when asked about their affair. Indeed, some say that Frank became so intent on saving Marilyn from her demons that he asked her to marry him.
“Her beauty and her vulnerability made her seem like a soft little pussycat that needed to be protected,” actress Ruta Lee exclusively told Closer Weekly—in the magazine’s latest issue, on newsstands now—at the Edwards-Lowell Gallery and the Andrew Weiss Gallery Present Marilyn Monroe: 17 Years in the Making opening night. Marilyn and Frank began seeing each other casually in the late 1950s—her maid Lena Pepitone says the star even moved into Frank’s L.A. home briefly to recover after her split from Joe—but their romance really heated up in 1961. “They spent a lot of nights together,” said Jimmy Whiting, a Sinatra friend. “They took bubble baths together.” Out of deference to her ex-husband, Frank tried to keep the relationship a secret. “He didn’t want Joe to get pissed off,” Jim White explained.
That August, Frank and Marilyn hosted friends on the singer’s yacht, but it wasn’t smooth sailing. “[Marilyn] was giving him a hard time…taking a lot of drugs and drinking,” and insider revealed in Sinatra: Behind the Legend by J. Randy Taraborrelli. “Marilyn was real dependent on Frank,” explained Jim White. “She used to say, ‘If I have any problem, there’s only one person I know can help: Frankie.'” Though Sinatra loved her, in February 1962, he announced his engagement to dancer Juliet Prowse—surprising even his closest friends. Not surprisingly, Frank’s new romance ended in just six weeks. That August, Frank invited Marilyn to Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe.
“When Frank saw Marilyn, he was alarmed at how depressed she seemed,” Joe Langford, a security guard, recalled. Frank had special meals sent to Marilyn’s room and worried about her well-being. “I think he proposed to her,” manager Milt Ebbins said. “He loved her and he would have done anything to save her.” But Marilyn couldn’t be saved and died one week later of an apparent drug overdose. “Frank was totally in shock for weeks,” said his valet George Jacobs. It grew worse when he arrived at Westwood Memorial Park and discovered that Joe DiMaggio had barred him from her funeral. “I loved her too,” a distraught Frank told a pal. “No one can say I didn’t love her too.” Source: www.closerweekly.com
Americans weren't cheery people in the beginning, argues Communication and cultural studies scholar Christina Kotchemidova. She writes that in the early eighteenth century, Americans, like Europeans, were more interested in melancholy. Many novels and plays aimed to evoke sadness. Both Catholic and Protestant traditions saw suffering as a means to virtue, and people who had been wronged were more likely to express sorrow than anger. Public crying was socially acceptable. But as the economy modernized, Americans became more individualistic and focused on controlling their own destinies. Sadness, an essentially passive emotion, fell out of favor. Around the time of the American Revolution, the emerging middle class began embracing emotional control as a key to success. In this view, being cheerful, even in the face of bad luck, allowed merchants to retain a necessary rational approach to their business.
Starting in the early twentieth century, companies implemented personality testing and psychological experiments designed to promote emotional control and interpersonal harmony. “Foremen and managers typically came from middle class homes where they had been brought up in a family culture of cheerfulness,” Kotchemidova writes. “Victorian women’s culture was bearing fruit. Meanwhile, a growing consumer culture called for salesmen who were able to ingratiate themselves with potential customers. How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie’s massively successful 1936 self-help guide, codified the need for pleasant behavior in the business world. The twentieth century also brought a general reduction of emotional intensity. Strong romantic love, fear, and anger all began to look like violations of rationality and self-restraint.
Cheerfulness, on the other hand, was a mild emotion that meshed perfectly with good social and economic performance. U.S. companies are certainly not unique in demanding that workers comport themselves in ways that increase collegiality and, it follows, productivity. But Kotchemidova argues that, compared with Europe, the nation’s lack of a formal social hierarchy means that Americans are more anxious about their social status, leading to “a constant need to lubricate social relations” with continual smiles and pleasantries, which unsettles some visitors. Source: daily.jstor.org
No comments :
Post a Comment