The future placement of Seward Johnson’s giant ‘Forever Marilyn’ statue on Museum Way in Palm Springs may soon be decided, as Sam Morgen reports for the Desert Sun.
“‘Forever Marilyn’ is one step closer to planting her feet in the middle of Museum Way after a decision by the Palm Springs Planning Commission on Wednesday.
The 4-0 vote sets the stage for the city to allow the 26-foot statue of Marilyn Monroe to permanently remain in its place despite years of pushback. It represents a win for PS Resorts, a hotel industry group which owns the statue and has advocated for its placement, while providing a setback for the Committee to Relocate Marilyn (CReMA), a group of residents who have sued the city in an attempt to force the statue to be moved.
The vote is the latest in a series of actions the city has taken to ensure the statue can legally stay in place. In December, the council voted 4-1 in favor of amending the Downtown Palm Springs Specific Plan in regards to Museum Way, opening the door to keeping the ‘Forever Marilyn’ statue in its current location permanently.
The action was in part an attempt to counteract one of the arguments in the lawsuit against the city, which claimed Palm Springs could not close a public street without holding a public hearing. The city initially sidestepped this requirement by saying the street closure was temporary. However, a 4th District Court of Appeal ruling in 2023 stated that while cities can close roads for as long as a few weeks, a multi-year closure was not allowed.
The lawsuit is still moving through the court system, but a vote by city council could nullify the need for any further developments.
Still, lawyers representing CReMa sent the planning commission a letter prior to the meeting arguing the statue does not, in fact, conform to the city’s general plan, and an environmental review is necessary before the statue can be legally placed.
‘The official street vacation process is what should have been done back in 2021 prior to the statue being installed,’ said Trina Turk, a Palm Springs business owner who helped found CReMA. ‘It’s sort of like they’re going backwards to do what they should have done several years ago.’
‘All we want is the statue to be moved off museum way,’ she added. ‘We recognise that it’s a valid tourist attraction, but being architectural preservationists, we believe that the placement in front of the museum is inappropriate and also illegal.'”
The ‘Forever Marilyn’ statue has been divisive ever since it was first unveiled in Chicago in 2011. While many flock to see it and take selfies, for some it’s an eyesore. It has been championed by the LGBT+ community, pilloried by the #MeToo movement, and ridiculed by art critics. When it first came to Palm Springs in 2012, the statue was located on Tahquitz Canyon Way and Palm Canyon Drive.
‘Forever Marilyn’ was transported to Seward Johnson’s sculpture park in New Jersey in 2014; to Australia for a Marilyn-focused exhibition in 2016; and to Connecticut in 2018, before returning to Palm Springs in 2021.
However, the relocation to Museum Way proved controversial from the start. Its defenders point to Monroe’s historic links to the city – but while she did visit several times, Marilyn never lived in Palm Springs. Nor was she ‘discovered’ there by Hollywood agent Johnny Hyde. (When Bruno Bernard photographed Marilyn with Hyde by the pool at the Racquet Club in 1949, they had been dating for several months.)
The ongoing debate over ‘Forever Marilyn’ has attracted media coverage worldwide. Earlier this month, Dan Kois took a deep dive into the ongoing imbroglio for Slate.
“Some people in Palm Springs are not happy about this statue. Some people are so unhappy they’ve filed a lawsuit to get it moved. The suit has cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars over three years and still isn’t resolved. A colossal statue of a midcentury sex symbol has pitted Springsian against Springsian, as wealthy residents used to getting their way find themselves in a battle over art, sexism, and small-city politics that can have only one winner. I came to Palm Springs for a weekend to answer what turned out to be a difficult question: As much of America is engaged in battles over very different statues that evoke its past, why is this one making so many fancy people so crazy?
Both sides of the debate seem to understand that basing their position too heavily on value judgments about the statue itself only spotlights the issue’s fundamental absurdity. In the rest of the country, they’re arguing about statues of Confederate generals. In Palm Springs, they’re arguing about Marilyn Monroe’s underpants. This is fitting, perhaps, for a make-believe city, an oasis in the desert created by unsustainable water policies and the Hollywood studio system.
Standing tall amid this sea of debate and procedural detail, Forever Marilyn is an inarguable rebuttal to any claim that this argument ‘isn’t about the statue.’ There she is, the statue. Her white dress is positively incandescent in the desert sun. Her bright-red toenails are the size of dinner plates. If you crane your neck and peer closely at her underpants, you can see that Seward Johnson lovingly painted scalloped lace all around their leg holes, a task that must have taken days. In the face of an object so overwhelming, who cares about the Palm Springs city code?
She is what the debate is about, not good governance or post-COVID tourism or rich people doing what they want without opposition. (Everyone involved in this debate is, basically, rich.) Yes, I understand that the specific cause of action behind the court case has to do with street-closure policy—a court case that seems likely to become moot once the city permanently vacates Museum Way. But that is not what this debate is about. This debate is about a huge, tacky statue flashing its underpants at a perfectly nice art museum that doesn’t want it there.”
The Marilyn Report 