I was lucky enough to attend a special screening of Some Like it Hot in Brighton on Tuesday – exactly 54 years after the comedy classic first opened in England. And today, the British Film Institute names it among the top ten movies set during the Roaring Twenties.

“‘All the time the flapper is laughing and dancing, there’s a feeling of tragedy underneath. She’s unhappy and disillusioned, and that’s what people sense.’ Thus spake 1920s It Girl Clara Bow, and if anybody else could ever know how that felt it was Marilyn Monroe, incandescent here as downhearted jazz cat Sugar Kane, forever licking the fuzzy end of the lollipop. Billy Wilder’s cross-dressing caper amps up the comedy even while it hits these low notes, expertly deploying its Prohibition era backdrop, in critic Raymond Durgnat’s words, “as an almost expressionistic setting for everything that’s harsh and hectic in American life’.”

Comic book artist Dina Gachman has written a guest post for Indiewire, explaining the concept behind Tribute: Marilyn Monroe, just published by Bluewater.

“Like a film, you’re telling the story visually in a comic book so first I would highlight any information that I thought was especially interesting and that we haven’t all heard a million times. I loved that she and Shelley Winters were roommates and that they got drunk with the poet Dylan Thomas one night, which ended with him crashing a car into Charlie Chaplin’s tennis court. To me that’s more fun and worthwhile than rehashing the conspiracy theories about her death or talking about her affair with JFK. You can’t fit it all in, so you set the tone, find out what really moves you about this person and their life, and hope other people agree.

I think after My Week With Marilyn and all the new books about her, people understand that Marilyn Monroe wasn’t some vacant bombshell. She seemed incredibly smart, complicated, and passionate about acting and books and art in general. There’s no question she was vulnerable, but that doesn’t mean she was weak. She was also such a talented actress; her “wiggle” and her kind of air-headed persona were a creation. She didn’t just walk onto a set and act natural. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes she’s as hilarious as Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig, or Tina Fey are today. Her comedic timing was pretty impressive.”

George Barris, 1962

Novelist Mhairi McFarlane has written about Marilyn’s enduring charm on the website of Guardian beauty expert Sali Hughes.

“The familiar image is the baby-doll pretty ’50s starlet with Milkybar hair, peachy cheeks and blood-red lips, but the Marilyn I love is in the informal, candid, soulful photographs by Eve Arnold or George Barris. Larking in a men’s cardi and bathing suits on holiday, or charcoal-eyed with bed hair, smoking a cigarette over a Manhattan balcony.”

You can read Mhairi’s tribute in full here.

Marilyn reads Walt Whitman, 1952

A few years ago, I made a list of all the books owned or read by Marilyn Monroe (some 436 at last count) for ES Updates. At the time, I wondered if anyone else would be interested.

In recent weeks, my list has been picked up by the New Yorker, Yahoo, and many other websites, after first being spotted by Dan Colman over at Open Culture.

I’m glad to have played a small part in widening public knowledge of MM, and hope that more people will now discover that for Marilyn, reading was much more than an intellectual pose.

The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody considers two overlooked moments in Monroe lore: her return to Hollywood in 1956, and her opening scene in the unfinished Something’s Got to Give (1962.) Brody also contrasts the condescension that Marilyn often received from the press with the overt hostility directed at her young admirer, Lindsay Lohan.

“Here’s Marilyn Monroe, interviewed on February 25, 1956, upon her return to Hollywood for the filming of Bus Stop. Part of this clip, along with the story behind it, is featured in Liz Garbus’s fascinating new documentary, Love, Marilyn…

Look at Marilyn Monroe, about twenty seconds into the clip, when a journalist ‘asks,’ without a question mark at the end of the sentence, ‘You’re a happy girl now.’ The infinitesimal silence that goes with her dubious glance—a tightly controlled eye-roll—away from the interviewer, followed by her ironic verbal shrug (a melodic ‘uh-h’ with a subtly derisive smile), suggests the equivalent of, ‘You have no idea.’ It’s in that sudden abyss of true and horrific emotion in the midst of the most conventionally candied context that encapsulates Monroe’s art—and art it is…

One of Monroe’s most moving performances is the one that seems to come from beyond the grave—it’s from the 1962 film Something’s Got to Give, from which she was fired soon before her death and which was never completed. The remaining footage, however, has been put together. It’s a remake of the 1940 comedy My Favorite Wife, with Monroe playing a woman who, having spent years shipwrecked aboard a desert island and being declared dead, returns home to find her husband remarried. Monroe comes through the gate six minutes in; she has the magical, floating, unreal aspect of a ghost. She hadn’t worked for more than a year, and she seemed to be returning from far away to a place where she belonged but may not have been welcome.

It’s too soon to know whether Lohan is in Monroe’s league (is anyone?)—she hasn’t had enough adult roles or enough good directors yet—but she did some extraordinary work before turning twenty, the age at which Norma Jeane Baker signed her first movie contract…Lohan isn’t the first great actress to confront addiction and other personal crises, but she has the misfortune to be living in an age of total exposure, when no studio publicist or code of silence can restrain reports of her sufferings as well as of her escapades…”

The Mexican edition of Playboy‘s latest issue features a different cover shot of Marilyn. Meanwhile, ‘Sunset Gun’ blogger Kim Morgan, whose wonderful tribute is a highlight of the magazine special, spoke to the Winnipeg Free Press about writing for Playboy, and what MM means to her.

“I wouldn’t say that I was being simply protective, though I do feel loyal towards her. I think there’s more complexity to how one approaches Marilyn, whether they know it or not, which is why she remains powerful to this day. And I mentioned Candle in the Wind briefly, a well-meaning song, in opposition to the song that runs through my piece, Bob Dylan’s She Belongs to Me, even though Dylan didn’t write it for MM. But to me, that song feels like Marilyn in all her beauty, complications, mystery and art. ‘She’s an artist.’ Marilyn was an artist.”

Over at The MMM Blog, Melinda Mason has details of the new MAC Cosmetics collection, which is Marilyn-inspired and due out in October.

Grace and Gladys with Norma Jeane

Michelle Morgan, author of Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed, has posted some interesting findings on her blog about Marilyn’s mother, Gladys Baker, and her friend Grace McKee’s life in Los Angeles during the 1920s.

“One of the things I loved, was when I discovered a news article about the Rayfield Apartments, where Gladys moved to with best friend Grace McKee, shortly after Marilyn’s birth.  The apartment block was situated at 237 Bimini Place and was fairly colourful - something that probably attracted the fun-loving Grace and Gladys.

I discovered a story that took place around about the very time the women lived at  the Rayfield, about a couple called Mr and Mrs Simpson, who also lived in the building.

Apparently the couple had had a big fight, and afterwards Mr Simpson took the unprecedented decision to phone the police, claiming that he had just murdered his wife.

Officers swarmed the block and began interviewing the ‘murderer’ Mr Simpson, but were shocked when Mrs Simpson – the murdered woman – walked into the apartment.  They interviewed her too and she of course denied all knowledge of ever being murdered by her husband!

Why Mr Simpson took it upon himself to phone the police and admit to killing a woman who was still alive and well is a mystery, but I always wonder – were Grace and Gladys at home when all this was taking place? Something tells me if they were, they most likely very much enjoyed the scandal going on just yards from their apartment!”

Another irony about this tale is that one of the songs from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - later cut from the movie – was called ‘When the Wild, Wild Women Go Swimmin’ in the Bimini Bay.’

This illustration by Istvan Banyai accompanies Maureen Dowd’s anniversary tribute to Marilyn in the New York Times.

The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, reports that artist Launa Eddy has recently inherited a trove of unseen photos by Bert Stern, including some of Marilyn, from her former employer, Edward Feldman.

LA-based artist Hildegarde Duane’s 2008 work, 14 Stations, a series of evocative photos of Marilyn-related locations, is flagged up by Archinect.

And Scott Blake, the man behind Barcode MM, has created a new video, Marilyn Monroe Supercut – a montage of Marilyn entering and exiting through 100 doors – including a clip from every one of her films except Let’s Make it Legal, reports the Huffington Post.

Biographile has interviewed Dr Lois Banner, author of Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox. Asked which celebrity today reminded her most of Marilyn, Banner replied, ‘I’m thinking. Angelina Jolie, maybe, because she’s smart and she’s tough. Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, they’re sort of dumb. Marilyn was never dumb.’

You can read the interview in full here.

The Huffington Post asked John Strasberg, Sarah Churchwell and Joyce Carol Oates what direction Marilyn’s career might have taken if she had lived beyond 1962.

“Back in those days, women, after a certain age, just weren’t cast in movies. Bette Davis was the first one to fight through the prejudice about how women should look in movies and playing leading roles; she had won Academy Awards, but she couldn’t get a job, so she put out ads in Variety and the such. Whether Marilyn could have done that, I don’t know. Certainly there was the possibility of that.” - John Strasberg

“My belief about Marilyn Monroe is that if she had only resisted returning to Hollywood, to make such an egregious movie as Let’s Make Love, but had remained in NYC in association with the Actors Studio, she might well have had a stage career as a serious mature actress; she might even be alive today.” - Joyce Carol Oates

“She had seen women like Betty Grable bow out gracefully, say, ‘I’ve had my time, and now it’s time for something else.’ So I don’t think it was difficult for Marilyn to imagine that.” - Sarah Churchwell

Writing about Marilyn for the Los Angeles Times, Dr Lois Banner argues that ’we make her into an icon because we can also make her into whatever we want her to be.’

“In the end, Monroe is one of the most complex female public figures in American history, and that real complexity plays a role in her continuing ability to fascinate us. We admire her beauty, puzzle over her mysteries and see her as a reflection of the quixotic, multifaceted, always striving and often contradictory American character.”

Writing for the Daily Beast, Agnes Scotti explores why Marilyn is still a role model for today’s young women.

“Marilyn was considered the most beautiful woman of her time. But she was more than that: she was a role model who showed young women that they could triumph over a troubled past and still grow up to be anything they wanted.

Marilyn wasn’t a perfect person. She had drug problems and alcohol problems and man problems. But the woman who died at 36 had survived a horribly dysfunctional family. She changed forever the way we look at women, sex, and acting.”

Marilyn was the subject of a TCM Summer Under the Stars blogathon on Saturday. One of the outstanding pieces was ‘Birth of an Actress’, a look at Marilyn’s role in Don’t Bother to Knock, from Kitty Packard Pictorial.

“Her walk down the corridor is a death march. She leans against the wall for support. Her beautiful eyes wide and full of numbed confusion. Her perfect face cracked with the deep stain of lost, desperate tears. This is not Nell Forbes. This is not Marilyn Monroe. This is Norma Jeane Mortenson. For the final 10 minutes of the film, she is exposed: for all her cosmetic perfection, she is raw and imperfect, alone and afraid, desperate to feel the warmth of love and kindness and respect but all-too aware that she never will.”

And yesterday at Sunset Gun, blogger Kim Morgan looked at the same movie, in a post entitled, ‘The Noncomformist: Norma Jeane Nell.’

“And yet there’s a wonderful strength to Monroe (the woman endured so much in her own life that she was, as Elton knows, more than a candle in the wind) — she was such a strong, singular performer (there will never, ever be another Marilyn) that her vulnerability gives her a special power, even as we want to hide her from every skulking Uncle Elisha Cook, ready to pounce. So bless her for revealing such powerful sadness. And bless her for holding on as long as she did. And bless her for never, ever being normal.”

 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