Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe
(1926-1962) 15-years-old
Marilyn Monroe:
Rosemary for Remembrance

by Edward Wagenknecht in his book
Seven Daughters of the Theater (1964)
Edited by Peter Y. Chou
WisdomPortal.com

Edward Wagenknecht's
7 Daughters of the Theater

Preface: On Sunday, January 7, 2018, Rudy & I went to Cinelux Almaden Theatre and saw Michael Gracey's
The Greatest Showman (4:15-6:15 pm). Rudy loved this musical starring Hugh Jackman as P.T. Barnum and
gave this film a "10+". Rebecca Ferguson starred as the Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind. So impressed with
P.T. Barnum, I want to read more about him. Went to Foothill College Library on January 9 and checked out
James W. Cook (Ed.) Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader (2005) (GV1811.B3.B37.2005) & Edward Wagenknecht's
Seven Daughters of the Theater (1964) (PN2205W3) with first chapter on Jenny Lind (pp. 1-49). The author
lived to 104 years old. I was surprised he included Marilyn Monroe among his seven stage actresses. After
reading his essay, it was the best article on Marilyn I had read. He paid homage to Marilyn not as an actress,
but a human being worthy of our admiration. Below are passages from his book worth sharing. I've included quotes from two favorite Chinese sages, Chou Tun-Yi (1017-1073): "Sincerity is the foundation of the sage" and Mencius (372 BC-289 BC): "The sage is one with a childlike heart."— in tune with Marilyn's inner life.

In the year 1962 there were two very exciting Sunday mornings. The second of these was a happy day. This was the Sunday in October when word came over the air that Chairman Khrushchev had committed himself to a course which seemed to promise a peaceful settlement of the Cuban crisis. But the first Sunday in August was all desolation, for that was the day we learned that Marilyn Monroe had been found dead in bed at her Brentwood home from an overdose of sleeping medicine. (p. 183)
The death of Marilyn Monroe was the exeption to all this. Many distinguished persons died in 1962, but I can think of none whose passing caused qite such sorrow in kind. The death of the young is always bitter because one cannot but feel that they have been cheated out of what life promised them, and that deprived themselves, they have also deprived us of what they might have continued to give us down the years. Then, too, Marilyn was very beautiful, and brightness falls from the skies when beauty dies. So Life cried out that "her death has diminished the loveliness of the world in which we live", and the editors of Vogue found the "waste" by which they were confronted "almost unbearable." "I think my response to her death was the common one", wrote Diana Trilling: "it came to me with the impact of a personal deprivation but I also felt it as I might a catastrophe in history or in nature; there was less in life, there was less of life, because she had ceased to exist. In her loss life itself had been injured." Where Life's memorial issue devoted 11 pages to her, Paris Match gave 36 to "la plus grande star du monde." (p. 184)
Thanks to the good taste of Marilyn's former husband Joe DiMaggio, she was interred with simple, quiet dignity in the presence of only a few close friends (the sister of the President of the United States crossed the continent to attend the service— and was refused admission), after a ceremony that was in harmony with what she was rather than what many ill-informed persons mistakenly believed her to be. What was more surprising was that DiMaggio's good taste should have rubbed off on the public to the extent that it did. Marilyn's death caused easily as much grief as Valentino's, but the people who expressed it were in general easier to respect than those who demonstrated over him, and the "mob" that the police were prepared to "handle" on the day of her funeral did not materialize at all, for the people who came to stand quietly outside the church to watch and to wait were simple, sad, quiet people who obviously had no thought in mind of any emotional orgies but had come instead to pay a sincere last tribute of respect to a girl whose beauty of face and figure and whosee sweetness of spirit ad brightened the world for them and whom they had loved. All this, I think, was heartening not only to those who care for films but even more to those who care for human values. It showed that a motion-picture actress can still be important to the world, and it showed too that we have not yet become collectivized to such an extent that personality has wholly lost its power to move us. (p. 185)
Carl Sandburg, who knew her well, always found Marilyn "a sensible woman", and indeed her common sense failed her only when she passed judgment on herself. There is a deep earthly wisdom even in some of her broadest quips and sometimes there is even more than this. Some of the shock that was awakened by her sexuality was mere prudishness, but some of it came, too, from those who are afraid of women— and of life— and Marilyn may well have cut deeper than she knew when she replied to critics of some of her more revealing photographs that "maybe they think girls should look like boys." In her own funny little way she once remarked, "I don't care for money. I just want to be wonderful", and who can deny that she was? All in all, few women can ever have paid a higher price for decency that this girl who became the Number One Sex Symbol of her time.
As a matter of fact, she was one of the most truthful persons who ever lived. As she herself once remarked, "I have a certain stupid sincerity." [Chou Tun-Yi: "Sincerity is the foundation of the sage."] When we do not recognize an allusion, most of us say "Oh?" in the wisest tone we can manage and pray that our ignorance will be overlooked, which it never is. When Marilyn was ignorant, she blurted it right out, for she always wanted to learn. "I don't consider myself an intellectual", she told a Chicago reporter. "And tis is not one of my aims. But I admire intellectual people." Her formal education was cut off early, and even then she seems never to have studied anything except the subjects that were of interest to her, so that she got good grades only in English. But she must be one of the few starlets in Hollywood history who ever spent her evenings in class at UCLA, and whe is the only woman I ever heard of in my life who, when she began to earn money, opened her first charge account not at a dress shop but at a bookstore. When Philippe Halsman went to her house to take a series of pictures of her for Popular Photography in 1953, he was shocked to find little or nothing in her wardrobe that he wanted her to wear. The girl had not clothes. She only had books and records. (p. 200)
When shortly before her death, she was asked whether she had any foreign languages, she replied with a laugh that she could hardly manage English. Yet when she was asked whether she knew that she was born under the same sign [June 1, 1926, Gemini) as Rosalind Russell [6-4-1911), Rosemary Clooney [5-23-1928], and Judy Garland (6-10-1922], she replied almost haughtily that she knew nothing about these people, but that she shared her sign with Emerson [5-25-1803], Whitman [5-31-1819], Bernard Shaw [7-26-1856, Leo; some astrology books listed Shaw as Gemini], and Queen Victoria [5-24-1819]. And she was not merely clowning, for there was a sense in which she was quite right in feeling that such as these were her people. (p. 201) [Note: Shelly Winters and Marilyn Monroe were roommates in their early Hollywood days. In her autobiography Shelley (1980) she writes: "One Sunday, we made a list of men we wanted to sleep with, and there was no one under 50 on hers," she adds. "I had Laurence Olivier, Errol Flynn— all the handsome actors and directors of that time." She sips some Coke, leans back on her bed and sighs. "I never got to ask her before she died how much of her list she had achieved, but on her list was Albert Einstein, and after her death, I noticed that there was a silver-framed autographed picture of him on her white piano."]
Footnote: Arthur Miller wrote of his wife in 1961: "To understand Marilyn best, you have to see her around children. They love her; her whole approach to life has their kind of simplicity and directness. [Mencius 4B:12: "The sage is one with a childlike heart."] I have not really helped her as an actress; Marilyn has perfected herself... The thing is, Marilyn has become a sort of fiction for writers: each one sees her through his own set of pleasures and prejudices." With this we may compare Marilyn's own touching comments on her happiness in her life with Miller, in an interview with Lester David, June 1957, published in This Week Magazine (April 12, 1964) under the title "Which Was the True Marilyn?" ("There's a feeling of being together— a warmth and tenderness. I don't mean a display of affection or anything like that. I mean just being together.") (p. 208)
The need to worship is the hallmark of the religious spirit, and the little girl who worships a movie star may be as pure in her devotion as she who pays homage to a saint, provided she is doin the best that she knows. Marilyn, as everybody knows, found her ideal in Lincoln, and it was Arthur Miller's first appeal to her that he reminded her of Lincoln. If whe had been merely a woman this might have served, but she was cursed and blessed by being an artist too, and whatever one thinks of the value of what she created, the devotion with which she gave herself to it was absolute. It was all she had, and it consumed her. (p. 209)
There were many elements in her complicated character, but at heart she belonged to that variety of human being called pilgrim. "I'm trying to find myself as a person. Sometimes that's not easy to do. Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do." In this respect she often reminds me of Katherine Mansfield, "My work," she said again, "is the only ground I've ever had to stand on. To put it bluntly, I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation. But I'm working on the foundation." I am not sure that if she had lived she would have become a great artist. I think it entirely possible that art might have represented only one stage in her development. What I am sure of is that she would have been a great human being... She was pure of heart. She was free of guile. She never understood either the adoration or the antagonism which she awakened. Because she was herself incapable of malice, she met it, when it was directed toward her, with a kind of dazed incomprehension, and because she never knew how different she was from other people, she did not grasp what her admirers saw in her much more clearly. There is not the slightest evidence that she ever experienced envy or jealousy; cruelty would have been completely outside her range even if she could have brought herself to desire it... The difficulty, however, is that unless we love her, we fall into grave danger of hating her, for the simple reason that her life and her nature constitute a judgment upon ours. But I have surely written of Marilyn to little purpose if I need to explain here that I trust her and believe in her, and that I am as sure as I can ever be of anything that her soul inhabits that world of light where the excellent becomes the permanent. (pp. 214-215)

Congo Republic C107: 100 francs (3-10-1971) *

U.S. 2967: 32¢
(issued 6-1-1995) *

Grenada 2468: 75¢
(issued 9-5-1995) *

Laos: 5500 kip
(illegal issue 1999) *

Democratic Republic of Congo: 5.00 cf (2003) *

Note: Click on stamp for enlargement. Click on asterik * for source of stamps.