Marilyn Gets Dandy With ‘The Chap’

Marilyn has been profiled in countless magazines, but Sunday Swift’s piece for UK quarterly The Chap‘s Winter 2019 issue (#102, with comedian Vic Reeves on the cover) looks at the paradox of MM/Norma Jeane from a different angle – as a female dandy, or ‘dandizette’.

“Norma Jeane played the character of Marilyn with just enough exaggeration so that anyone who tried to imitate her would fail. If someone played it with too much camp, it would look caricature-ish – and if they didn’t play it with enough, it would not look genuine … Even she saw a duality in herself that she wasn’t sure what to do with – Marilyn, the sex bomb dumb blonde who had affairs with powerful and famous people, and Norma, a brilliant, nervous, scared little girl who wrote poetry and was too timid to speak up in acting class.”