Sam Shaw, photographer and friend to Marilyn, was born almost 100 years ago, on January 15, 1912. A newly relaunched Shaw Family Archives website have announced a variety of exciting projects marking this important anniversary. including: 100 Photos for Press Freedom, a magazine tribute; a statue based on Shaw’s most famous shot of Marilyn, on location for The Seven Year Itch, to be placed in the French city of Boulogne-Sur-Mer; the ongoing ‘Marilyn in New York‘ subway exhibit; and Shaw’s inclusion in the Ferragamo Museum’s Monroe exhibit, which ends on January 28th.

Interestingly, the Shaw family recently collaborated with art publisher Taschen on a tribute to James Bond. Imagine what they could do for Marilyn!

Thanks to Chris at Club Passion Marilyn

Smash cast members Megan Hilty, Debra Messing and Christian Borle are pictured here marking the 50th anniversary of Marilyn’s death during filming of the upcoming second series.

According to Starpulse, Messing also shared a Monroe quote on Twitter: ‘A career is wonderful thing, but you can’t snuggle up to it on a cold night.’

Hilty re-tweeted the post: ‘Can we get RIP Marilyn Monroe trending worldwide? R.I.P to this beautiful icon of the 20th century! Never forgotten!’

 I have posted two tributes to Marilyn on my personal website:

Fifty Years Ago… an extract from my novel, The Mmm Girl, in which a young Marilyn visits the grave of her beloved Aunt Ana

The Smart Dumb Blonde - my review of the recent BBC radio documentary, presented by Maureen Dowd

Today’s San Diego Reader, and The Mirror feature vintage news reports on Marilyn’s death, while NBC has revealed a TV broadcast on the tragedy. Time has posted a variety of articles about Marilyn from their archives – some written during her lifetime.

In an article for The Guardian, Irish novelist John Banville recalls his first sighting of Marilyn (in River of No Return), and considers her legacy – as depicted in recent books by authors Susan Bernard, Adam Victor and Dr Lois Banner.

“I first fell in love with her in River of No Return, in which she starred with Robert Mitchum and Rory Calhoun. The movie was released in 1954, and probably did not get to Ireland until the following year, so I was 10 when I saw it, at the Capitol Cinema in Wexford. The Capitol was a rather gaunt, barn-like picture palace, with a wooden floor and seats covered with balding plush that gave off a curiously doggy smell. But the glory of the place, at least in my memory of it, was the great scarlet curtain, fluted and fringed, that would open with a deeply suggestive swish as the house lights dimmed and the dark screen came to flickering life.

For many years that curtain was associated in my mind with Kay Weston, the saloon-bar singer Marilyn played in the movie – no doubt the shade of rich red and the sumptuous, silken folds seemed the very essence of sexiness, for a boy who as yet knew nothing about sex…”

Over at Princeton’s Town Topics, Stuart Mitchner compares the lives of two American legends: Marilyn, who died on August 4, 1962 (officially dated August 5th); and Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, who was born on August 1, 1819; married on August 4, 1847; and met Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, on August 5, 1850.

(Another link between these two American legends is John Huston, who directed a screen adaptation of Moby Dick, starring Gregory Peck, in 1958.)

“And of course both leading players in the great American reality show were doomed to fall, Melville, his masterpiece all but ignored by the press when it wasn’t being scorned, telling Hawthorne in 1856 that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’ (only to die in obscurity almost four decades later); Marilyn in her own freefall of failed marriages, miscarriages, professional humiliation, dying world famous and alone at 36.

Though there may be no prototypical Marilyns in Melville’s work, there are definite intimations, beginning with Fayaway in his first book, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846): ‘This gentle being had early attracted my regard, not only from her extraordinary beauty, but from the attractive cast of her
countenance, singularly expressive of intelligence and humanity,’
with ‘a tenderness in her manner which it was impossible to misunderstand or resist.’ Strange but true, that the author now best known for Moby Dick and Billy Budd, with their all-male casts, created the literary equivalent of a Hollywood diva he delights in personally costuming: ‘Out of the calico brought from the ship I made a dress for this lovely girl’ that ‘began at the waist, and terminated sufficiently far above the ground to reveal the most bewitching ankle in the universe.’

There are also intimations in Melville’s work of the troubled, vulnerable, lonely being Miller perceived in ‘the saddest girl’ he ever knew. In Pierre: or The Ambiguities, the prodigiously immoderate, mannered and tormented, at once dated and uncannily ‘modern’ novel written in the aftermath of Moby Dick, the bipolar title character finds himself obsessed by a ‘mystical face,’ a ‘shadow’ that has ‘come forth to him’ and that appears to take the form of his mysterious, illegitimate half-sister, Isabel. “The face haunted him as some imploring, and beauteous, impassioned, ideal Madonna’s haunts the morbidly longing and enthusiastic, but ever-baffled artist.’ Evoking the beguiling ambiguity at the heart of Marilyn’s appeal, on the screen and in her imperishable afterlife, Melville’s Isabel ‘lifts her whole marvelous countenance into the radiant candlelight,’ and when ‘for one swift instant, that face of supernaturalness unreservedly meets Pierre’s,’ it’s with a ‘wonderful loveliness, and a still more wonderful loneliness.’

Enchanted Island, an unlikely film version of Typee, was directed by the veteran Allan Dwan in 1958 with 50-year-old Dana Andrews in the Melville role and petite blonde Jane Powell, age 30, as Fayaway. The last picture made at RKO, it was released by Warners with the Four Lads singing the title song. (Feel free to roll your eyes.) More interesting and perhaps even more unlikely is Pola X, a sexually explicit French adapatation of Pierre directed by Leos Carax that turned up in 1999 with the late Guillaume Depardieu in the title role and Yekaterina Golubeva as Isabel. The film title is an acronym of the French title of the novel, Pierre ou les ambiguïtés, plus the Roman numeral ‘X’ indicating the tenth draft version of the script that was used to make the film.

In the best, strangest, and most unlikely of all possible worlds, Marilyn Monroe would have been a heartbreaking Fayaway and a devastating Isabel.”

Staff at Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles, noticed a number of floral tributes placed by Marilyn’s crypt on her recent birthday. The heart-shaped daisy wreath, at right, was donated by members of Immortal Marilyn, who also raised $311 for the Animal Haven charity.

 Posted on Twitter

Dr Lois Banner, whose MM biography will be published in July, has written a birthday tribute to Marilyn for the Huffington Post.

“A deeply spiritual individual and a believer in astrology, she considered her sign — Gemini, identified with ‘the twins’ — to be an indicator of who she was. Geminis supposedly have shape-shifting personalities that swing between opposites: happiness and sadness; kindness and narcissism, shyness and ebullience.

Such swings were standard for Marilyn, who could be so shy that she would stammer in confusion; so bold that she could swear like a trooper; so mesmeric that she drew everyone’s attention; so ordinary that she drew no attention. She could be withdrawn or ebullient, downcast or laughing, with an ability to make hilarious puns or tell jokes. She could be a seductress to men or a buddy, playing pranks as one of the boys.

She was proud of her mercurial self, as difficult as it could be to handle. A reporter once asked her: ‘Did you know that you were born under the same sign as Rosalind Russell and Judy Garland?’ Showing her considerable intelligence, Marilyn replied: ‘I know nothing of these people. I was born under the same sign as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Queen Victoria and Walt Whitman.’”

Banner also relates a little-known anecdote about a birthday gift Marilyn once received from dress manufacturer Henry Rosenfeld.

“In 1955 Henry Rosenfeld, a manufacturer of women’s dresses in New York and a wealthy friend and occasional lover, gave her a 200-carat diamond bracelet for her birthday, with the note, ‘I want you to be happy above everything else in the world.’ (Marilyn owned mostly costume jewelry; the real diamonds must have thrilled her.) Marilyn and Henry, who met by accident in New York in 1949, when she went on a tour to promote Love Happy, were very close throughout the rest of her life; before Marilyn married Arthur Miller, he was jealous of Henry.”

Norma Jeane Mortenson (aka Marilyn Monroe) was born on June 1, 1926, 86 years ago. This photo, taken by Lawrence Schiller in 1962, shows her celebrating her 36th birthday with co-star Dean Martin, on the set of Something’s Got to Give.

A young Marilyn in Palm Springs, 1940s

Marilyn’s star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars (first unveiled in 1995) will be rededicated on her birthday, June 1st, reports KESQ.

“The city just assembled a 26-foot-tall statue of Monroe last week and, for the June 1 star rededication, Manhattan in the Desert deli and bakery will provide a birthday cake big enough to serve 250-300 people, walk organizers said.

The ‘Forever Marilyn’ statue — it depicts the star trying to hold her dress down as it is blown up by a rush of wind from a subway vent in ‘The Seven Year Itch’ — will be unveiled Thursday at Palm Canyon Drive and Tahquitz Canyon Way.”

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of Marilyn’s ‘Happy Birthday Mr President’ performance for John F. Kennedy. Cultural historian Martin Kemp writes about the event for Oxford University Press.

“In a glittering faux-nude dress tighter than her own skin and enveloped in a soft fur wrap, that most desirable of female bodies shuffles with exaggerated mini-steps towards the podium, like a penguin on speed. Her floss hair has long given up any pretence to organic life. She is unwrapped by Lawford and ups the sexual ante with mute lip squirming directed at the microphone, which she holds tenderly like a living member. Everything is comically kitsch yet irresistibly powerful.

‘Happy Birthday to you…’ The little girl’s voice haltingly rings out, quietening the raucous auditorium — a ghostly and troubling echo of a past innocence. The reality is a deadly cocktail of her own desperate desirability and the blood-sucking exploitation of the society that made her. A monstrous tiered cake, flaming with the requisite number of candles like a funeral pyre, is borne in on a stretcher, shoulder-high. Her death was to arrive at the age of 36 in a little over two month’s time.”

Sunny Thompson’s acclaimed one-woman show, Marilyn: Forever Blonde, will be performed at North Hollywood’s El Porto Theatre on August 2nd-5th, marking the 50th anniversary of Monroe’s death.

Elisa Jordan reports for the Examiner:

“The parking lot for the El Portal is the same lot used during the day by Lankershim Elementary School where Norma Jeane Baker attended sixth grade in 1937.

In conjunction with the Immortal Marilyn fan club, a special performance of Marilyn: Forever Blonde is planned on Saturday, August 4, for fans visiting Los Angeles during the memorial week.”

 If you’d like to be part of Immortal Marilyn’s Valentine tribute – to be left at her grave – please contribute via Paypal to  [email protected] by 1pm Sunday, US Central time. All proceeds beyond the cost of the flowers will be donated to the Animal Haven charity.

Let’s celebrate with some art from Ileana Hunter. This is after Willy Rizzo’s 1962 session with Marilyn. I like its dreamy, magical quality.

 After Marilyn’s 1951 session with Edward Clark, also lovely.