Kim Morgan has posted an eloquent birthday tribute to Marilyn on her Sunset Gun blog.
“No, there’s something more to Marilyn that makes her continually interesting. It’s all her now legendary tragic contradictions …juxtaposed with her peaches and cream gorgeousness, her absolute command of the big screen (in spite of her problems with lines) and her ultimate, natural talent. It’s her ability, after all these decades, to still pop off the screen with such undeniable ‘It’ that we almost take her for granted. Of course Marilyn Monroe is one of the most famous women in the world, who doesn’t know how wonderful she is?
That as manufactured as her screen persona was — we can imagine how her skin might have felt. Or how her perfume might have smelled. Or even her sweat. Of course we’d all like to be in her presence, at least once, just to experience her realness. Or her real fakeness. Her tragedy is so merged with her fantasy that her humanness becomes one of the sexiest things about her, which is why her photographs are so endlessly intriguing, so haunting, like Milton Greene’s ‘Black Sitting.'”