My Weeks with Monroe – or How if you live long enough everybody’s bad decisions begin to make sense or seem forgivable

Today, at this late hour, perhaps as a result of my own long-accumulating internal turmoil (blogs tend to be about the self in some way or another, aren’t they?), I find myself gravitating towards the figure of Marilyn Monroe, and filled with a combination of feelings for her that I have never felt towards her in this particular manner: acute sadness, sympathy, empathy, and unceasing pain. Normally: the thought of Marilyn conjures up the blonde siren in the iconic bright pink dress, surrounded by odd-looking men carrying kitsch red heart-fans, and with her running up and down the red-carpeted steps and singing Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend in Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Sparking with diamonds, of course.

Or I would think of her in the even more iconic ivory pleated tulle dress, blowing up in the wind from the grate at the subway in a still taken from a scene in Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955). Just last year (2011) this famous pose was concretised as ‘Forever Marilyn’, a 26-foot-tall sculpture by Seward Johnson on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, Michigan Avenue, and the actual dress that Monroe worn for the film sold for $4.6 million at an auction for Hollywood costumes and props collected by Debbie Reynolds. [1] However, possibly like most people, I just know the picture – I am still to see the film or the sculpture or the dress.

Or more associations still… when I think of Marilyn I would see her as the charming and endearing Sugar ‘Kane’ Kowalczyk, the ‘all-girl’ band vocalist in Billy Wilder’s later film, Some Like it Hot (1959). Her rendition of I Wanna be Loved by You whilst dressed in a backless and almost see-through lace costume is hypnotic, inviting, sexy. I wanna be loved by you, just you/Nobody else but you/I wanna be loved by you, alone – sang in almost a whispering tone, perhaps purred, but simply charmed in its seeming effortlessness and easy sensuality. That same sensuality that Michelle Williams adorably captured in her portrayal of Monroe in the recent film My Week with Marilyn (2011) directed by Simon Curtis. Clearly: 2011 was Marilyn’s year. Anyway, if the over 2 million views on YouTube for that Some Like it Hot scene are not a useful testament to the scene’s enduring appeal, I’m not sure what is:  

Here is this woman, one of the most recognisable of women in 20^th century Western popular history, very beautiful (of course), at the top of her game in possibly one of the meanest industries in America, and yet… in full public view – breaking down. Complaining of exhaustion. Taking too many days off work. Work looming nonetheless, overwhelming. Shortly before her death she had been fired by Fox Studios from the set of the last film she was to ever make and never finish, Something’s Gotta Give. For 17 of the 30 shooting days she had called in sick, and cost the company massive amounts of money for the delay in production costs. After a massive scandal, a looming and feasible threat that her career in Hollywood might be over, and then after being re-hired, she was found dead two days later possibly from a suicide by overdose of sleeping pills. (Her physician, however, maintains that an overdose of the amount of pills he had prescribed for her would not have been sufficient.) If suicide, exact reason why: unknown.

All sorts of other things were at play: for one, time passing; the actress known to the whole world for her dazzling beauty, now just past 36, and perhaps growing anxious that in time other youthful purrers will soon replace her. Going out while still at the top. Others: unsuccessful and possibly damaging psychoanalytical treatment. Obviously, depression. Insomnia – hence the sleeping pills. Unsatisfying and increasingly risqué sexual and love relations (if this is the right term) with strangers. Unsuccessful marriages behind her, but still no sense of being ‘at home’ in the world. Some blame the Kennedys. Others the mafia. Some say the mafia in order to spite the Kennedy brothers. Either way, in this woman we have an illustrative case of fame and money not buying you happiness. Whatever the cause, headlines such as ‘MARILYN DEAD’ on 5 August 1962 left the world stunned; of all things that could have happened that day, the death of Monroe (especially by sucide) was the amongst the least expected.

In the documentary Marilyn’s Last Moments about Monroe’s unfinished film, Monroe’s physician, Hyman Engelberg, M.D., says after her death he had received “several phone calls from ordinary women. The general feeling was if they had only known Marilyn was in trouble, they would have done everything they could to help her.” From this rather sad helplessness and irrational sorrow and empathy most people must have felt at her death – and what I, years later, am possibly feeling now – Engleberg draws the rather ludicrous-sounding (but profound) conclusion that “Marilyn didn’t just have appeal for men; women were aware of the lost little girl inside of her and they reacted to that.”[2]

Put differently: women (like the men) loved her too; they saw her as this great happy woman onto whom they could project their fantasies about themselves; the iconic image of the happy, perfect life, only to be shocked that all or most was veneer – behind the picture was a vulnerable, deeply unhappy woman who just wanted someone to save her because he had no ability or time to do so herself. But no one realised that and so no one came to the rescue or with the appropriate methods (everyone gave the love they could but it was the wrong kind of love). Worse:  everybody wanted something from her but no one took the time to think she too might need something (love, care, perhaps affection) from somebody. So afterwards, everybody, but particularly other women, felt bad about it and called her doctor to set the record straight.  The whole thing is just so sad. So sad.

Of course there is no ground for comparison, but her life is instructive – even if in the negative. Today I feel for her because, selfishly and childishly, I suppose, because there is an element of her experience that makes some kind of sense to me, finally, and those last days make sense somehow, finally. I suppose if I knew her this would be the time when I’d say “Marilyn, sweet bird you were, I miss you today.”  

Ella Fitzgerald: "I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt … she personally called the owner of the Mocambo [a popular upmarket, celebrity-frequented but racist nightclub], and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him – and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status – that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman – a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.”[3]

Photo credits: Main picture © George Barris, 1962. Film stills © 20^th Century Fox, I suppose. Monroe with Fitzgerald © unknown.

---

[1] http://www.toledoblade.com/Art/2011/07/15/Huge-Marilyn-sculpture-unveiled.html

[2] For the relevant extract from the film see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGfuaBhTslQ&feature=relmfu

[3] For a context of the Fitzgerald-Monroe connection, see Stuart Nicholson's 1993 Ella Fitzgerald: A Biography of the First Lady of Jazz (p. 149) by Da Capo Press. Or see: http://groovenotes.org/2012/03/22/how-ella-fitzgerald-and-marilyn-monroe-changed-each-others-lives/

As Another Year Passes: Final Part

A Song in the Front Yard

by Gwendolyn Brooks

I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now
And maybe down the alley,
To where the charity children play.
I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.
They have some wonderful fun.
My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine
How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine.
My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae
Will grow up to be a bad woman.
That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late
(On account of last winter he sold our back gate).

But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do.
And I’d like to be a bad woman, too,
And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace
And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

Brooks. Photographer and date unknown.

As Another Year Passes: Part 2

Letter to N.Y.
For Louise Crane

by Elizabeth Bishop

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

—Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

Louise Crane and Bishop, 1937 (Crane Papers, Yale)

As Another Year Passes: Part 1

Animals

by Frank O'Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then

when we were still first rate

and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it’s no use worrying about Time

but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves

and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal

we didn’t need speedometers

we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn’t want to be faster

or greener than now if you were with me O you

were the best of all my days

Photo of O’Hara with Grace Hartigan, Allan Kaprow, Joe Hazan, Jane Freilicher

at George Segal’s house in New Jersey. Photo by John Ashberry, 1955

Listen to a beautiful recording of Zadie Smith reading this poem: http://www.coudal.com/qts/animals.wav

Bodies in Light: highlights from the 5th Infecting the City Public Arts Festival

One of Victorine Muller's Bodies in Light sculptural performances

The 2012 Cape Town based Infecting the City Public Arts Festival has come and gone and all we are left with are memories and archives. Overall, bad memories - memories that one might do well to forget. In its 5th year the festival had a lot on offer and visitors were treated to free entertainment by some of the most well-known artists (dancers, fine artists, actors, musicians, performance artists, etc) over the 6th - 10th of March at various venues or spots throughout the city. To be sure, some of the performaces were captivating, even if not great, but most of them were just not good enough even though it was clear that the majority of the festival goers seemed to think otherwise. Thankfully with the passing years  and with the growing trust in my own aesthetic responses, I've grown less and less inclined to kowtow to hype, celebrity or majoritarianism when evaluating art. To me, a lot of people took the performances at the 6th Infecting the City festival very seriously, yet on closer scrutiny few performances deserved that much attention. What this festival brought to the fore, for me, was the general decline in standards, not only in the aesthetics of performance but also in judgement. Judicious discrimination of the performances on offer by the attending audiences was lacking, and both these downward spirals (in performance and judgement) were made possible and veiled by the artists' own unbearable sense of self-importance and self-promotion as well as the audiences' fear of appearing silly and dumb and facing ostracisation from the fringe herd for failing to enthusiastically receive these senseless or simply silly spectacles by the oh-so-out-there artists. 

The brew was perfect for what it was not intended to be: a comical farce of pretensions masquerading as revolutionary art and artistic integrity on the part of the artists and deep artistic appreciation on the part of the audiences, where very little of either was visible or warranted. After one incredibly silly performance ('radical' because of its excessive use of the pissing-on-the-sacred variety of shock), I remember asking another artistically inclined acquaintance  what he thought of it and him responding hesitantly, 'There is a lot to think about there,' and I thinking to myself, 'Not really, no.' But I decided to be move closer to neutral and simply said 'Well, don't get constipated over it.' 

I shall not be specific about the performances I hated - as it should be obvious by now there were far too many; the festival opened with a bad bang (Dada Masilo's Death of the Maidens - incredible dancers though) and closed with an even worse bang (Julia Rayham's Phylum and Phoenix - about which I have absolutely nothing positive to say), and in between was glut so ridiculous (Athi Patra-Ruga's Ilulwane being the prime example) I kept being grateful I didn't have to pay anything for being subjected to this besides lost time. Writing a full piece about the bad state of affairs will take me forever and in the end it will not be worth the effort. Instead I shall focus on the pieces I liked, elucidating why I liked them best. One I liked the most was one that I thought was greatly misunderstood and highly under-appreciated all round: Victorine Müller Bodies in Light sculpture performances that happened every evening during the festival. Ole Hamre's Capeofon was  another brilliant respite from all the madness and was very popular with festival goers, and Vincent Mantsoe's NTU/// was brilliant despite some challenges posed by the space that prevented a fuller appreciation of the piece.

NTU///... What charge! What emotional energy! As with most pieces at the festival, I cannot claim to know with unchallenged certainty what the piece was about and I won't pretend to do so now, but unlike most pieces on display, this lack of clearly discernible meaning from the panoply of symbolisms was not a bother - the piece was so captivating a performance in and of itself it was simply amazing to watch. This was not the first time Mantsoe performed NTU///. A quick search on the internet makes this clear, and besides, the festival brochure also carried a glowing extract from a review by the New York Times for the same performance.  The man could move, and in those movements was contained a narrative that conveyed struggle, release, regeneration, and at times an emotion akin to total joy, bliss. Despite the steady and increasing breeze at the Company Gardens that had a number of us reaching for our coats and jerseys by the time the performance was over, Mantsoe was a boiling inferno with drips of sweat to prove it. He seemed locked in an embrace of an internal dialogue with a phantom I could not  entirely grasp but could not but wish to understand by unremittingly starring at him converse with it and journeying with it to the climax and decline of the encounter.

This beautiful piece, however, was not served well by the physical (open air) space at which it was staged: this one-man show would have been better served in a closed, more intimate environment, preferably an indoor arena setting, in which the emotional intensity of the piece could be contained by and transmitted amongst the audience members. A space in which all the occasional and attention-grabbing foot stomping would have registered the changes of tempo and the build-up of 'narrative' and change of pace and mood they seemed to signal. A space where the gradual shedding of garments, and later, in exchange for others might have transmitted to us a clearer signal of what stirrings of the body in motion was trying to convey. A space where the meanings behind the very choice of and the details on those garments could have been visible enough for us to take note and analyse and thus add more to the picture that was unfolding beautifully in front us. Also, such an ideal space with its accompanying intimacy might have helped to shield the obvious repetitions that made up the piece, something that was not always easy to ignore (or forgive or accept as a necessary procedure in the conceptualisation of the performance) in the vast open air stage. But then such a space would defeat the point of 'public art', wouldn't it? Maybe then this is something that the future planners of the festival could keep in mind - some pieces just need more intimate public spaces for them to work and more effort in that direction could be made. Nevertheless, despite all these challenges the existence of contemporary dancers like Mantsoe is a comfort that all is not lost, and France (where he is based) is lucky to have him and South Africa should boast to have produced him.

Ole Homre's Capeofon was another pleasant surprise that kept getting better as it progressed, offering the audience delights unforeseen and totally absorbing. The first of such offerings was the presence of Kyle Shepherd, the Cape Town based but internationally acclaimed pianist and all round musical prodigy - he was not listed anywhere in connection to the piece and it was such a pleasure to hear him play  after the long hours of dross spectacle.

[TBC...]

The Three Graces of Modern American Cultural Criticism

“The story of modern American cultural criticism is the story of three California girls who went East — Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion.” – David Kipen

Rene Francois Armand Prudhomme (1839 – 1907)

"In special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect”







Les (i) Stances et Poemes turn into Stanzas and poems which tune me into your vision;
A thinking beat box echoes your heart’s intellect.
An optical nerve infection blinded your dual gaze only so that a myopic vista would inspire even the partially blind to see through your lettered passions.
20/20 visionaries silenced by the one eyed master’s literary monster volumes.

Your full beard comes as no surprise;
Copious bodies of works are efforts birthed from tireless tug-of-wars ‘tween silver-black strands of hair and the natural clipper of thumb and forefinger.

A jazzy French bibliophile who kept beautiful (ii) ‘Italian Notebooks’
Who wrote demise laden sentences inflected by the (iii) Impressions Of War;
Lovers still exchange (iv) Vain Endearments
Promising universes to each other

Signs of happiness [v] (Les Epanez) earmark your grand finale
Chiseled monuments are born from dedications eked from debunked sacrileges
Stanzas and Poems

To you: Rene Francois Armand Prudhomme

By Themba Zipihilele Moyake

With this project, the author intends to eventually publish poetry commemorating all the nobel laureates. The idea is to also read, at least, a book from each laureate for purposes of 'personal' literary canonization. ~



References:


(i) Prudhomme, Rene Francois Armand. Stances et poème.s [Stanzas and Poems] 1865.
(ii) Croquis Italiens [Italian Notebooks] 1866 -1868
(iii) Impressions de la guerre [Impressions of War] 1872.
(iv) Les Vaines Tendresses [Vain Endearments] 1875.
(v)  Les Epaves [Happiness] 1908.