In this section: Intro Vaudeville and Music Hall The First Stars The Challenge of the Air The Picture Palace4 Marilyn Monroe, The Dream Woman
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Her existence as a sex queen will be reincarnated in a woman. It is not that her sex will disappear so much as that the sex queen will become an angel of sex ...
It was as if she wanted to become the angel of American life; as if, beneath every remaining timidity and infirmity, she felt that she deserved it. Perhaps she did. Are there ten women's lives so Napoleonic as her own?
She was charismatic, a center of attraction, who seemed to embody what was taken to be a central feature of human existence at that time. After her death at least as much as during her life, the image of Marilyn Monroe has fueled prurient fantasy. An industry devoted to the exploitation of the enigma has invaded every aspect of her life in search, not of answers, but of new images.
The hot-lipped girl in the plunging gold lame dress is also Norma Jean the illegitimate, abused, girl-child and the Marilyn of the Last Sittings, wom out by satisfying all that desire aimed at an object which shared her body. Marilyn was Woman-as-Madonna, child, whore and victim, all in one.
She started her career as a pin-up girl, and one can find no type of image more singlemindedly sexual than that. Pin-ups constituted a constant and vital aspect of her image right up to her death, and the pin-up style also indelibly marked other aspects of her image, such as her public appearances and promotions for her films. The roles she was given, the way she was filmed, and the reviews she got do little to counteract this emphasis.
 She plays, from the beginning, "the girl," defined solely by age, gender, and appealingness. In two films, she does not even have a name, Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948) and Love Happy (1950), and in three other films, her character has no biography beyond being "the blonde," Dangerous Years (1948), The Fireball (1950), and Right Cross (1950). Even when any information about her character is supplied, it serves to reinforce the basic anonymity of the role. For instance, when her character has a job, it is a job that, while it may be genuinely useful, like that of a secretary, is traditionally (or cinematically) thought of as being a job where the woman is on show, there for the pleasure of men. These jobs in Monroe's early films are chorus girl in Ladies of the Chorus (1948) and Ticket to Tomahawk (1950); actress in All About Eve (1950) (the film emphasizes that the character has no talent); or secretary in Home Town Story (1951), As Young As You Feel (1951), and Monkey Business (1952). There is very little advance on these roles in her later career. She has no name in The Seven Year Itch (1955); even in the credits she is just "the Girl." She is a chorus girl in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), There's No Business Like Show Business (1954), The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), and Let's Make Love (1960), and she is a solo artiste of no great talent in River of No Return (1954), Bus Stop (1956), and Some Like It Hot (1959). She is a model (hardly an extension of the role repertoire) in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and The Seven Year Itch (1955), and a prostitute in O. Henry's Full House (1952). Thus even in her prestige roles, Bus Stop and The Prince and the Showgirl, the social status of the person she plays remains the same. The tendency to treat her as nothing more than her gender reaches its peak with The Misfits (1961), where, instead of being the "girl" from the early films, she now becomes the "woman," or perhaps just "Woman"—Roslyn has no biography, she is just "a divorcee"; the symbolic structure of the film relates her to nature, the antithesis of culture, career, society, history. 4 Next Page: Sporting Superstars: Pele and Muhammad Ali
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