At 14 years old I enjoyed my first taste of recognition as a writer - I won a prize in the annual Post Office Letter Writing Competition.
The theme was: write a letter to someone you admire, so I wrote to Marilyn Monroe.
She is mesmerisingly beautiful and a joy to behold, so it’s not immediately obvious why a lank-haired, flat-chested English teenager might feel moved to write to a bosomy blonde American sex goddess. Yet, the moment I saw her on screen and then found myself caught by those bewitching eyes staring down at me from the shelves of the Athena poster art store, I sensed a connection.
Reading about her unsettled and deeply unhappy childhood and her estrangement from her mother, I discovered the common ground we shared, and what I (and countless others) had recognised in Marilyn’s eyes. To the teenaged me she was a beacon of hope - she had survived suffering and become a star!
Marilyn Monroe’s gift for connecting with people has transcended her death, not just through her stunning photographic portraits. Year after year, memoirs of her briefest affairs and friendships have ballooned into books and films to feed the public appetite for all things Marilyn.
A few weeks ago, decades after my teenage crush, a paperback of Lois Banner’s Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox caught my attention, and once again I found myself bitten by the Marilyn bug.
Banner, a scholar rather than a fan, pinpointed Marilyn’s mysterious and untimely death as a chief reason for her continued popularity. She argues that people are free to make of her story what they wish, depending on how they believe she died. And, had she survived, given the extraordinary decade of race and gender politics that unfolded following her demise, there are almost endless permutations of how she might have become.
But, for me, reading about Marilyn again was an uneasy trip back to my former self, as well as an examination of where I am now.
Banner’s scrupulous exploration of her highly nuanced character, the sheer drudgery and sexual exploitation that lay behind the glamour of Hollywood, her extraordinarily fast-paced, demanding life and the debilitating demons that dogged her to the last, all served to make me feel far more informed about Marilyn than ever before. But it was also difficult to distinguish where the research ended and my wisdom had grown.
At 14 I eagerly read anything about her I could get my hands on. It was usually disappointing. Most books about her seemed to be by men who claimed to have slept with her. The experience of having sex with Monroe was not something that particularly interested me, and I was too young to appreciate the self-harm that her promiscuity signified. I was far more intrigued by the dichotomy that her meteoric success crowned by such tragedy represented.
In fact, it went deeper than that. To some extent I wanted to be Marilyn. I didn’t see how just being me would get me anywhere. Being told on a daily basis I was a Plain Jane and I needed to ‘work on my personality’ proved that.
But, if the physical transformation lay beyond the realms of possibility, playing the part wasn’t. I spent my Saturday afternoons listening endlessly to a cassette of Marilyn’s songs, learning every word of them down to the last boop boopy doop. Desperately hoping some of the magic would rub off.
Marilyn’s magic is inimitable. Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn, came close to portraying it. But as I grew older I began to understand that I did have something that Marilyn had in spade loads - and that was sex.
It seemed like magic when, despite everything my mother had said, I realised that men found me attractive. And it easily became addictive as my shredded ego sucked up male attention like a drunk hoovering up dregs at the end of a party.
But as intoxifying as it is, it also becomes its own trap. If your currency is sexual attraction, then age can only devalue your net worth. As your bum and your boobs shift southward and your complexion becomes less than pristine, you need to search your soul for something else to cherish.
I wonder if she would have managed?
I no longer have a copy of my letter to Marilyn, but I think I probably asked her, why oh why, when you had everything that is supposed to make you happy in this world - beauty, success and fame - were you clearly not? Surely you are the proof of their fraud?
Thirty years after writing that letter, I realise that she is also the proof of something else. To be absolutely yourself is by no means easy. It is a work in progress and the hardest thing you will ever do. To find yourself without being taken in and taken over by the fake promises of money and drugs and vanity is a momentous task.
You might just die before you do it.
