“When she walked, it was as though she had a hundred
body parts that moved separately in different directions. I mean, you didn’t
know what body part to follow.”—Former New York Times managing editor Arthur Gelb,
quoted in Maureen Dowd, “The Love Goddess Who Keeps Right on Seducing,” The
New York Times, August 5, 2012
A half-century to the day that she died, Marilyn Monroe remains an object of
fascination, in a way that others who have died younger (such as Jean Harlow, a
full decade younger than Monroe at the time of her death) have not. Gelb (who
cops to making, and following through on, a boorish, drunken bet that he could touch the star’s “flawless porcelain
back” at Sardi’s) has put his finger on one element, her overpowering sexuality.
(Billy Wilder also captured that walk in her memorable introduction in Some Like It Hot—a movement so
astonishing it leads Jack Lemmon’s cross-dressing, mob-dodging musician to gasp
that it’s “like jello on springs”).
She was the ultimate woman who makes guys act endlessly stupid just by her sheer presence.
But only part of the fascination owes to her raw
physical appeal. Much of the continued interest relate to her
vulnerability, the lingering questions of Kennedy involvement in her last
desperate days, and her attempt to break out of the image that she herself had
so adeptly created.
Goodbye, Norma Jean. It’ll be a long time—if ever—before
we see your like again.
(Photograph of
Monroe in her famous dress-with Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger
Jr., , on the occasion of the President’s 45th birthday party
celebration in New York’s Madison Square Garden, in 1962 —by Cecil W.
Stoughton, official White House photographer.)
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