Marilyn covers the May issue of UK magazine The Oldie with a 1953 photo which has been digitally re-colourised.
A similar image was recently featured in an Instagram post from Bésame Cosmetics, promoting the ‘1959 Red Hot Red’ lipstick (inspired by Some Like It Hot), although the original photo shows Marilyn wearing a mauve shade.
Shot by Gene Trindl as part of a promotional shoot for How to Marry a Millionaire, this photo made the covers of the US magazine Modern Screen in October 1953, and Cinelândia in Argentina in December 1954.
Marilyn previously graced The Oldie‘s cover in August 22, on the 60th anniversary of her death. And now as she reaches another milestone, playwright Simon Berry revisits Marilyn’s friendship with the English poet Edith Sitwell, which is also the subject of his radio play, The Dame and the Showgirl.
“In January 1953, at the Sunset Tower Hotel in Los Angeles, Marilyn Monroe met the poet Dame Edith Sitwell. The encounter had been arranged by Life magazine, which sent along the photographer George Silk to record it. Sitwell had been commissioned to write about Hollywood; the article never appeared. The photographs, however, survive. And one of them haunts me.
Monroe was 26 and on the brink of stardom … the transformation from Norma Jeane Baker to Marilyn Monroe was all but complete. Sitwell, by contrast, seemed to belong to another century … one of Britain’s most distinguished poets, fêted in America, shortly to be made a dame, and still cultivating an air of eccentricity.
Monroe, for all the effort expended in persuading the world otherwise, was no fool … Sitwell’s childhood was marked by emotional neglect … Monroe’s early life was harder still … [Sitwell] often referred to herself as plain … It may also be that Sitwell recognised, earlier than any, that Monroe’s beauty was both her salvation and her predicament.
What remains is the photograph: two women, born 40 years apart, from entirely different worlds, briefly face to face. And, astonishingly, finding a deep connection with each other … If The Oldie possessed a time machine, think of the articles that could have emerged. ‘I Once Met Marilyn Monroe’ by Edith Sitwell – and, more enticingly still, ‘I Once Met Edith Sitwell’ by Marilyn Monroe.
I’d love to read them.”
Elsewhere, there’s a rather snide review of an upcoming publication, Marilyn and Her Books, suggesting that author Gail Crowther – whose previous works include biographies of Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker – ‘knows nothing of literature,’ while also pouring scorn on Marilyn’s literary aspirations.
While I haven’t yet read Marilyn and Her Books, I recently finished Andrew Wilson’s new biography, I Wanna Be Loved By You: Marilyn Monroe, A Life in 100 Books, which received an equally vitriolic review from the same journalist. Writing for The Critic, Christopher Bray called Marilyn ‘a hopeless actress,’ arguing that Wilson is ‘too starstruck to see [her] faults.’
Both magazines are conservative-leaning, although The Oldie is not overtly political. While I’m open to differing opinions – even if negative – and agree that Marilyn’s life and achievements are too often shrowded in hyperbole, Wilson’s book is a fairly measured account overall.
And so I have to wonder why this critic seems fixated on tearing down Marilyn (and anyone who writes seriously about her), while simultaneously bolstering his own profile with her name. Ultimately, these attacks uphold the false dichotomy that pitches her as either a genius or a fraud, a saint or a whore – rather than the complex yet fascinating woman which Marilyn undoubtedly was.
The Marilyn Report 