What Marilyn Monroe Means to Me

It wasn’t until my 33rd birthday that I really understood Marilyn Monroe, in all her beautiful and pained glory. It wasn’t, as these things go, a very happy birthday. The year 2018 had already yielded three humiliations: a stint in rehab, the loss of my fertility, and a breakup that everyone expected (hard to know if that’s the better or worse kind). Unlike the reticent Marilyn—whose early 30s produced her own 50-car pileup of public humiliation, but who rarely spoke about any of it—I never shut up and I certainly didn’t put red lipstick on to cover the sad truth. My resistance to celebrating was so great that my friends decided to throw me an arts-and-crafts party, as if I were an obstinate 11-year-old whose class needed to be bribed into attending her festivities. Amid tempera paints and sequins and press-on googly eyes, we drank ginger ale—the sober woman’s Dom—and friends nodded with loving patience as I decorated a jewelry box in muted tones. I was well past any illusion of adulthood being ahead of me, but dogged by a sense that I was still not living like a grown-up, and I couldn’t find much reason to try.

In the stack of presents from friends—a tie-dye sweatshirt, a pearlescent locket with my dog’s photo in it, a pair of shoes with cat ears on the toe—was a book from my friend Alissa, who has made it her business in life to catalog, with rare empathy, the humiliations of women exposed to public attention (we now do it together, on a podcast called The C-Word, where we have spent nearly 70 hours detailing the triumphs and miseries of female eccentrics, icons, and even murderers—a gothic hobby, but a hobby nonetheless). As the night wound down, adults with glitter on their hands smoked cigarettes over subway grates and talked about day care and mortgages and other things I had forgotten to want. Alissa handed me her gift, that fat white coffee-table book, its corners tugged at by wear—Norman Mailer’s ode to (and thesis on) Marilyn, titled simply with her first name. On the inner cover, Alissa had inscribed: “For Lena—who, like Marilyn, has something for everybody.” In that moment, when I felt I had nothing for nobody, I clung to it: a bible and a life raft.

It could be argued that no woman has been more closely examined. She’s received the once-over in books by public intellectuals, biographers, and fiction writers alike—not just Mailer but Gloria Steinem and Joyce Carol Oates, whose novel, Blonde, will be given a film treatment starring Ana de Armas next month. She’s a figurehead of crass American excess, standing in Madame Tussauds with her skirt forever blowing upward, her famous dress on display at Ripley’s Believe It or Not! (and, more reverently, on the Met Gala red carpet last spring). Her death 60 years ago, of a barbiturate overdose in her Brentwood bed, has created a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists—was it the CIA? murder?—and some who intersected with her only briefly have made their livelihoods talking about it. We can even, if we are so inclined, google an image of her in the morgue. Megan Fox proudly got a tattoo of her and then had it removed, saying, “I do not want to attract this kind of negative energy in my life,” and it was easy to understand what she meant. Marilyn’s fame was—is—gigantic but lonely, lasting but impersonal. Who, once they really looked at the facts, would want to wear that as a totem?

As a young woman, I didn’t much care about her. I was obsessed with those I perceived as shifting the cultural landscape toward something more like…weirdness—Gilda Radner, Grace Jones, and, later, Tina Fey. I thought that girls who cited Monroe as an inspiration were at best trite and at worst boring. I did pose as Marilyn for a magazine—with bleached hair, sucking on a whipped-cream-dotted cherry—but only after convincing myself it was a kitschy commentary on the kind of woman we deem worthy of attention.

It was, finally, reading about her private life that showed me the triumph and tragedy of her arc. Marilyn’s public presence was playful, seductive, and purposeful. She posed like she was living in an ecstasy of eternal summer, her breathy voice conveying an appealing lack of need—but her private life was marked by pain. Abuse, addiction, and abandonment defined her until, at 36, she died and became forever encased in the amber of our all-American fantasies. Thirty-six—an age that seemed, when I first learned her story, to be without defining factors. But now that I’m here—36 and a half, to be exact—I understand the unique set of fears that set in once you’ve moved past your prodigious 20s. To be 36 is to understand that, while a lot more life can be expected, there are certain things that cannot. If you are childless, you have either made that decision, or you’ve entered a phase of hoping that has the bitter tinge of panic. If you are not yet seen as the thing you believe you are—you feel people don’t know quite how serious or powerful or sexy you can be—you have realized it will be a Herculean struggle to change this. Thirty-six is an age where, without the proper support structures and self-belief in place, it would be easy to roll over, say “Fuck it,” and go back to sleep. It seems, based on the all too readily available photo of the bed where she was found dead, that this is what Marilyn did.

Marilyn—famously once Norma Jeane Baker, and born to a single mother who would later be diagnosed with schizophrenia—spent her young life being passed like a minor inconvenience from home to home. When she was 16, rather than be recommitted to foster care, she married a 21-year-old neighbor, marking the beginning of a “this bed’s too hard, this bed’s too soft” journey that would take her through two more marriages and countless relationships. Her union with Joe DiMaggio was celebrated by the public until, nine months after they wed, she appeared outside their house in Beverly Hills in tears, having filed for divorce. In the still-available footage, her pain is gripping—her desire to disappear, the losing struggle she is in with the camera. And then when she married Arthur Miller, a union widely speculated on because of the different intellectual spaces they seemed to occupy, she attempted domestic life in Connecticut, studying watercolor and pivoting to the role of muse. But Miller’s love letters, one in particular sold at auction, show that he was as obsessed by her body as any boy with a poster of her above his bed: “And as you stand there cooking breakfast, I will kiss your neck and your back and the sweet cantaloupes of your rump and the backs of your knees and turn you about and kiss your breasts and the eggs will burn.”

In private, Marilyn suffered—not just from unceasing anxiety and depression, which doctors were happy to medicate (and here I can relate, having relied on a readily available chemical shield to navigate the terrors of my late 20s). She also dealt with severe endometriosis, a disorder of the reproductive system that remains woefully misunderstood and is the reason I had my own uterus ousted at age 31. Marilyn was obsessed with becoming a mother, convinced it would cure the loneliness that plagued her. When she had her appendix removed in 1952, she is rumored to have taped a note to her stomach, begging them not to take her ovaries. Marilyn’s miscarriage in 1957 (at the time, the Palm Springs newspaper, The Desert Sun, reported she was five to six weeks pregnant when “the curvaceous screen star was wheeled into the hospital on a stretcher”) was said to be a major contributing factor to the depression that hastened her addiction and haunted her cinematic swan song, The Misfits.