Marilyn Monroe 1926-1962
Marilyn is featured in this one-off special from Elle, joining Sarah Bernhardt, Ella Fitzgerald, and Brigitte Bardot among forty ‘Women Who Changed History‘. (Her photo was taken during a tour of Brady Airbase in Fukuoka, Japan in February 1954.) The magazine is available now in France for € 6.95.
Marilyn was also the subject of L’Autre là, la Blonde, a play starring Marie-Line Rossetti as an older Monroe, staged last week at the Balcony Theatre in Avignon.
Marilyn 1962, a novel (in French) by Sebastien Cauchon about Marilyn’s inner circle during her final months, has just been published in paperback and via Kindle. It is also the subject of an article in the latest issue of Elle magazine (French edition.) As yet there is no English translation for Marilyn 1962, but watch this space.
“Eunice, Whitey, Cherie, Ralph, Inez, Paula, Agnes, Evelyn, May and Ralph again as well as Larry and Pat.
Behind these twelve names: colleagues, friends or close friends around whom Marilyn Monroe lived her last months in Los Angeles in 1962. Her family. In reality nearly all of her employees. Amongst them, not one whose daily professional life was not tied to their privileged relationship with the actress. For a long time simply recurring names stumbled across in the pages of biographies or spotted at the end of film credits. Bit players in Marilyn’s world whose faces could be seen on her periphery in press photographs if you took the trouble to scan the background. A small, attentive, salaried group composing her ‘entourage’ as it is commonplace to define those whose lives revolve around celebrities.
A shadow army with a subtle and shifting social order composed of allies from the outset as well as new recruits, the strong-willed and the discreet, top professionals as well as no-hopers. An entourage at the heart of which co-existed latent conflicts, open hostilities, suspicion, dedication, plots and sometimes sincere camaraderie. What did it mean to them to rub shoulders with Hollywood’s greatest star?”
Michelle Williams has been talking about her performance in My Week With Marilyn. She told Newsweek, “I knew all the stuff that was written in Arthur [Miller’s] journal. I knew what she read. This man was going to save her; this man was going to give her the family she never had. Her vision of the world got reinforced again. There it goes: Everyone will abandon me. That’s such a devastating point of view.”
Michelle also graces the cover of December’s Elle (UK edition, out tomorrow.) Of Marilyn’s style, she says, “Something I really appreciated about her is what a simple dresser she was. She’s really, in her personal life, completely unadorned. Everything that she wore looked like she could take her shoes off and run through a field. And I like that.”
Of the private Marilyn, Michelle explains, “I had always been more interested in the private Marilyn, and the unguarded Marilyn. Even as a young girl, my primary concern wasn’t with this larger than life personality smiling back from the wall but with what was going on underneath.”
“Jean Harlow may have been the original bombshell but Marilyn Monroe is the most iconic. Her image was simultaneously sexy and childlike. Monroe’s high-pitched voice and carefully curated dumb-blonde persona were paired with an intense sexuality and the most celebrated curves of any bombshell … She met a tragic death suspected to be at her own hand at 36-years-old but her image and career is the most celebrated of all the bombshells.”
Marilyn makes Elle magazine’s list of the Top 20 Bombshells