Mythic: Marilyn's sphinx-like smile has become shorthand for all that was delightful and all that was shameful about 20th-century America. Photo / Getty Images
"All my life I've played Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe," wept the actress in 1960. "I've tried to do a little better – and find myself doing an imitation of myself. I so want to do something different."
Unfortunately, movie audiences wanted the exact opposite: more Monroe, maximum Monroe. In her lifetime, their appetite was rampant enough to sustain the careers of shameless imitators, such as Jayne Mansfield ("the poor man's Monroe") and Diana Dors ("Swindon's answer to Marilyn Monroe"), and make 20th Century Fox millions – of which Monroe herself saw so little that on her death, in 1962, she didn't leave enough money to pay for a funeral. Joe DiMaggio, the second of her three ex-husbands, forked out for the private ceremony she had wanted, only to find fans tearing apart the floral tributes for souvenirs, like maenads.
Today, anything Monroe touched is coveted with a religiosity comparable to the medieval mania for the relics of saints. Collectors fight for pots of make-up in which you can still see her trailing finger marks. The tag and licence for her pet poodle (Maf, short for Mafia, a present from Frank Sinatra) sold in 1999 for $63,000. In 2016, the dress she wore to sing "Happy Birthday, Mr President" to JFK in 1962 was bought by Ripley's Believe It or Not Museums for $5 million. "We believe this is the most iconic piece of pop culture there is," said Ripley's vice-president. "I cannot think of one single item that tells the story of the 1960s as well as this dress." Next month, Andy Warhol's 1964 portrait, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, is expected to set a new record for a 20th-century artwork when it goes on sale in New York, estimated at around $200 million.
What is it that makes people want to get their fingers on a part – any part – of Marilyn Monroe so badly? It's a question that Joyce Carol Oates, author of Blonde, a 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Monroe's life, plays with in a new short story, "Miss Golden Dreams 1949", out this month in a collection called Night, Neon. In it, a sex doll made from Monroe's actual DNA whispers to bidders at Sotheby's, goading them to outbid each other to take her home. "It's a surreal story, even a sort of horror story," Oates tells me, from her home in Princeton. "But it's metaphorical. So many people tried to possess Marilyn while she was still alive."
Blonde – a 740-page epic about the American dream and the female body which plays with tricks of voice, and mixes invention with fact, horror with fairy tale – has now been made into a film by Andrew Dominik, with Monroe played by the Cuban actress Ana de Armas (of Knives Out and No Time to Die). Long in development and shrouded in secrecy, it is expected to premiere at the Venice Film Festival this autumn – and Oates is one of the few people to have seen it (in a near-final cut) already. "I thought it was extremely intense," she tells me. "Very stylised and beautiful."
And what about the gore? Her novel is relentlessly frank about the messy realities – menstruation, endometriosis, miscarriage – of Monroe's much-drooled-over body. Will the film do for Monroe what Spencer, which shocked audiences with its unflinching depiction of bulimia, did for Diana, Princess of Wales? "It's very intimate," confirms Oates. "There are elements of the movie that are quite horrific. In a very brilliant way."
Dominik bills the movie as "a tragedy… an unwanted child who becomes the most wanted woman in the world and has to deal with all of the desire that is directed at her, and how confusing that is. It's kind of a nightmare. It's about being in a car with no brakes. It's just going faster and faster and faster."
Oates loves de Armas in the lead role – "she looks just like the young Marilyn" – but isn't it a doomed exercise, I ask, trying to impersonate the most famous film star of all time? Oates disagrees. "Marilyn Monroe was a performance. It was a whole persona of infantile female sexuality, a strange conjoining of innocence and this seductive, over-the-top glamour, with her platinum blonde hair and her whole manner – very breathy. If people called her at home, she wouldn't answer that way. She would answer the way we're talking. Her housekeeper said that too. When she was around the house in her jeans and a sweatshirt, she was nothing like that. "Marilyn Monroe was a performance – by Norma Jeane Baker. And so, in a sense, we could all try to do Marilyn."
Born in 1926, Norma Jeane's surname was first Mortensen, then Baker, as stepfathers came and went. Rare among stars, she was a literal child of Hollywood: her mother, Gladys Baker, was a studio film-cutter. And her life began with a movie-esque mystery – the plot, in fact, of Mamma Mia! – who was Norma Jeane's real father? The previous summer, Gladys had slept with too many men to be sure. The only thing certain, as Monroe later put it, was that "I guess I was a mistake."
It was a photograph of Norma Jeane Baker that gave Oates the idea for Blonde, precisely because the girl in the picture wasn't blonde at all. "She was 16 and had this brunette hair and she was very pretty – but not glamorous," Oates tells me. "The kind of girl who smiles, who goes into nursing – something that makes other people like them."
Monroe's miserable childhood – "Dickensian", Hollywood was quick to brand it – reminded Oates of her own mother, "the ninth of nine children, and she had to be given away. Marilyn Monroe was also given away by her mother – she was put in an orphanage. And it was so unfair because her mother [by then in and out of institutions for schizophrenia] prevented her from being adopted."
But Blonde – which Oates wrote as her own father was dying – could just as aptly have been called Daddy Issues. Norma Jeane, Oates tells me, "felt she had to live up to her invisible father. She was literally a bastard child [and] she always felt inadequate about that. And when she got to be about 12 or 14, she noticed that men and boys would really look at her. And kind of smile at her. And she'd smile back. Then she started wearing lipstick and tight sweaters. She was getting from the world these gazes of approval and interest that were new to her, and that buoyed her up and made her feel better. Unfortunately, there's no end to that. A person who's so wounded in childhood can never, never get enough love.
"So she wore people out – her husbands." (Before DiMaggio came police officer James Dougherty; after, the playwright Arthur Miller.) "She called them Daddy. It sounds like a sad cliché, but she really called her lovers Daddy," says Oates. "I can't imagine being married or involved with a man whom I would call Daddy. To me it just would be… really, really weird."
This juxtaposition of the infantile with the hyper-sexual – which to us, seems so troublingly paedophilic – was in the 1950s a cause for celebration. In 1951, 20th Century Fox briefed the press that "With [Shirley] Temple, we had 20 rumours a year that she was kidnapped. With [Betty] Grable, we have 20 rumours a year that she was raped. With Monroe, we have 20 rumours a year that she has been raped and kidnapped."
This "whispering, simpering, big-breasted child woman" so infuriated the teenage Gloria Steinem that she walked out of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes "in embarrassment". Cecil Beaton found a diplomatic compromise when he called it "pure charade, a little girl's caricature of Mae West. The puzzling truth is that Miss Monroe is a make-believe siren, unsophisticated as a Rhine maiden, innocent as a sleepwalker. She is an urchin pretending to be grown-up, having the time of her life in mother's moth-eaten finery, tottering about in high-heeled shoes and sipping ginger ale as though it were a champagne cocktail. There is an otherworldly, a winsome naiveté about the child's eyes…"
For Oates, fatherlessness explains Norma Jeane's drive to be perfect, taking night courses, acting lessons, dance classes – anything to better herself. "Norma Jeane always felt that if she could just be a little bit better, her father might actually acknowledge her. I think she felt that she had a father out there in the Hollywood hills, watching her career, and if she really, really did well, he would acknowledge her and bring her home."
Oates planned Blonde as a novella, ending as Norma Jeane, after a brutal rape, gets a contract and is rechristened Marilyn Monroe. "And then I thought – what am I doing? Her whole life is just beginning." So Oates continued, fighting the "psychological malaise of writing about someone who is going to die, not because you make them die as a fictional character, but because she died. And she was so unhappy at the end of her life – just extremely depressed, on a kind of nightmare of barbiturates, maybe psychosis, not being able to sleep. Then if she wanted to work, she had to take amphetamines during the day. So she's constantly on some drug or other, plus she had trouble with John Kennedy. "It's sort of like a ludicrous soap opera – instead of having trouble with your boyfriend, it's actually the president of the United States."
Monroe's most famous loves were the American equivalent of aristocrats: a president, a baseball hero (DiMaggio), a literary lion (Miller). But she saw her appeal as proudly blue collar: "the kind of girl a truck driver would like". The studios may have invented Marilyn Monroe but it was the people who made her a star. In 1951, she was named Miss Cheesecake of the Year by the army newspaper Stars and Stripes. While still being cast in bit parts, she was getting more fan mail than Gregory Peck: up to 3000 letters a week. By 1953, it was up to 25,000 a week – a Hollywood record. But she had no clout: Jane Russell was paid $150,000 for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Monroe only $15,000.
What Oates calls Monroe's "sweet-baby cosmetic mask of a face" was a feat of plastic surgery (new nose, new jaw) and at least two hours a day in the make-up chair. But underneath it, she was no dumb blonde. She dreamt of playing Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. She was political: she forced a Hollywood nightclub to break its colour bar and book the jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald. "Sincerity and trying to be as simple or direct as possible is often taken for sheer stupidity," she wrote. "But since it is not a sincere world – it's very probable that being sincere is stupid."
After a succession of sexy-child-ingenue parts, she longed to stop being Monroe for a while. "I had to get out, I just had to. The danger was, I began to believe this was all I could do – all I was – all any woman was." So in 1955 she went to New York, to live with Lee and Paula Strasberg, of the Actors' Studio. But although Henry Hathaway had publicly named her "the best natural actress I've directed", the Strasbergs' pop-Freudian "method" acting insisted Monroe go back to her childhood and rake up all the sexual abuse of her foster homes, and express that misery in her performances, which took away what little confidence she had, and left her in the clutches of some extremely dubious therapists, who funnelled her full of pills like a foie gras goose.
She started talking about Marilyn Monroe in the third person. "I just felt like being Marilyn for a minute," she would say, stopping the New York traffic. When Truman Capote found her glued to the mirror, she explained: "I'm looking at Her."
Then Arthur Miller, her impecunious new playwright husband, wanted to write a film for her. "One of the fantasies in my mind was that I could get away from Marilyn Monroe through him," she said. So she went back to Hollywood. But the result, The Misfits, cast her as a wan version of the old Monroe – minus the humour. (Oates thinks she looks like a drag artist in the movie.) "He could have written me anything, and he comes up with this," Monroe fumed. "If that's what he thinks of me, well, then, I'm not for him and he's not for me."
When Monroe appeared to sing "Happy Birthday, Mr President" to JFK in 1962, his brother-in-law Peter Lawford announced her as "the late Marilyn Monroe". Three weeks later, she was dead. Earlier that year, she had bought a hacienda in LA with the words "Cursum Perficio" engraved on a flagstone: Latin for "I have run the course".
Monroe had been planning to make a biopic of her childhood obsession, Jean Harlow, Hollywood's original peroxide sex symbol, who – like her – loved disastrous men, was better than the movies she was in, fought the studio system, and had a complicated mother. "I kept thinking of her, rolling over the facts of her life in my mind," she said. "It was kind of spooky, and sometimes I thought, 'Am I making this happen?' But I don't think so. We just seemed to have the same spirit or something, I don't know. I kept wondering if I would die young like her too." Harlow was dead at 26, of kidney failure, after endless shots of sedatives by the studio doctor.
The unembroidered facts of Monroe's life – spawn of Hollywood, doomed to be Harlow – already feel like a novel, full of clunky foreshadowing. No wonder that, decades later, Miller told Oates everything that had been written about Monroe was a kind of fiction. Her story attracts it, even before all the unreliable and conflicting testimonies – people claiming to have been her best friend, or even her secret husband – that since her death have accrued like barnacles on a sunken wreck.
People want to insert themselves into Monroe's story, to own a piece of her, because she feels like America's closest equivalent to a Greek myth. Her sphinx-like smile has become shorthand for all that was delightful and all that was shameful about 20th-century America.
And we can't let her go. A new Netflix documentary, out on Wednesday, picks over the convoluted mystery of Monroe's death, this time through little-heard tapes from her inner circle. In Oates's novel, Monroe takes an accidental overdose – but there follows a scene where "the Sharpshooter" from "the Agency" comes to deliver a lethal dose of nembutal in a hypodermic, and clear her house of written "materials". Does Oates share the view that Monroe was killed – because of the Kennedys, because of the Mafia, or both?
"That could be something like a hallucination," she tells me. "But I also wanted to leave the possibility – like an alternative universe. It's quite possible – not probable, but possible – that she was assassinated." It's more probable that "she might have been allowed to die" after telephoning for help. Oates points out that Monroe's house had been cleaned out, and her telephone records expunged before the LAPD arrived at the scene. "They came after some other law enforcement – probably the FBI."
Either way, Monroe "would have probably tried to commit suicide at some other time. She was sort of doomed. She was in a kind of tunnel." In the end, says Oates, "glamour killed her."
'Part memoir, part masterclass in hope.'