Marilyn Monroe: An icon at 80

Marilyn Monroe would have turned 80 on 1 June this year. It's an anniversary that raises intriguing questions: if she was still alive, what would she look like? Would her iconic status also have survived? And how would she feel about the vultures still squabbling over her legacy? Here, the renowned film writer David Thomson dares to speculate

She had been born on one of the most promising days of any year, 1 June, with the whole summer laid out before her. It was 1 June, 1926 - the last full year of silent movies; a time when people were reading Mrs Dalloway and The Professor's House by Willa Cather; it was the year when Louis Armstrong began his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings. In other words, it wasn't just a long time ago, the past; it was a terrific now when the world seemed to be breaking out in wondrous new things. And Norma Jean Mortenson was as bright and as pretty as any kid born in Los Angeles, California, the place on earth most addicted to hope.

Which means that Marilyn Monroe would have been 80 this 1 June. No, hope didn't carry her that far - or was it that mercy or resignation intervened? She was found dead on the morning of 5 August, 1962, in her rather plain house in Brentwood, still in Los Angeles. The time of that death, its medical science, the proper autopsy of her fabled body - those things are still not settled, and never will be now. For as soon as her death was reported, so a flock of nagging birds, with sharp pecking beaks - ourselves - came down upon the corpse and started feeding. It is because of that that we can tell ourselves she is not dead. Her fame lives; her stories multiply in awful mockery of her failure to have children or leave work for which she felt much pride. So we may see her exit now as a start to the fearsome age of American melodrama and paranoia. We sigh and say, of course, her guys - the Kennedy boys - were both gone within a few years. So much hope gone. We cannot guarantee that they were linked in life and death. But as Norman Mailer recognised once, in her last years Marilyn had begun to look like a Kennedy. Maybe her cell structure longed to be someone else, was ready to be Jackie, in the pink suit stretched out on the back of the limo in Dallas holding a piece of her husband's brain and crying out to the heavens. Marilyn and Jackie, we surmise, had fears in common. They had open eyes, fond and aghast, watching the beginning of the end of America. And if Marilyn didn't live to see 22 November, 1963, she knew enough about the friction between celebrities and the public to be unsurprised by it.

Imagine an artist trying to imagine Marilyn at 80. Is she the great blonde head we knew but collapsed, eroded, with cavities where there were eyes? Or is she fat, as gross as Orson Welles or Marlon Brando, those receptacles of genius or God's grace who could not stop the way in which self-loathing or the (omega) drag of futility made them grow? Do we think that Marilyn could have made it to 80? Do we see a way in which James Dean is 75 this year, or Elvis 70 last year? If Marilyn had gone to bed with half the big, dangerous men that are alleged, wouldn't she have had to be murdered sooner or later? Or if at 36 she was so into medications that she could wake in the night unable to remember which pills she had taken, wasn't it certain, sooner or later, that she'd be found curled up in some bathroom, like Judy Garland, dead at 47? You don't even have to suppose that Marilyn had a great and glorious time in the way of a hedonist like Orson Welles, so that her heart or her liver would wear out.

It's all too plain that Marilyn felt pretty lousy, pretty shitty, because the world insisted that she was their endless whore, the one that always came up smiling, no matter the way she was gossiped about, no matter the fairly clear evidence that, in all that trade and circling, she had lost faith in sex or the pleasures it can offer. If she had ever known them. Men discarded Marilyn from their affairs because she was clingy, insecure, teary and an endless series of plumbing problems. Men get bored by such details. She wasn't just a vast, firm, blonde beach on which every man's wave could break. She was a wreck, the way some shorelines are being eaten away by relentless tides.

No, it's far too late to wrap her up in the comforts of belated psychoanalysis. That was tried in her lifetime, above all by the Strasberg family - Lee, the autocratic teacher of actors; Paula, his wife; and Susan, their daughter. As a trio they claimed to have glimpsed some extraordinary acting resource in Marilyn. You can easily find base reasons for that: they wanted her as a lover or a disciple - if you could get Marilyn to be Nina in The Seagull or Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov, then surely your Method was the greatest of all acting teaching models. If you had Marilyn at the studio, there was that immense, if insane promise: it was like teaching Yo-Yo Ma to be a race-car driver, maybe. If it worked.

There was an extra twist to the Strasberg collection. Marilyn died without heirs of her own. She left her estate to Lee Strasberg, and as he died so Anna Strasberg, Lee's surviving widow, has come to be Marilyn's heir. Yet Anna Strasberg did not even know Marilyn. Just as the star-to-be came into the world with uncertain parentage, so she left it with unknown heirs. And Anna Strasberg is now fighting hard to protect the name and imagery of Marilyn Monroe. It sounds crazy only in a society where celebrity breeds lawsuits better than it does family ties.

But don't eliminate the possibility of real madness in Norma Jean. Director George Cukor believed that and recalled that the mother, Gladys, had spent most of her life in institutions. "Marilyn had this bad judgement about things," said Cukor. "She had this touch with comedy but her friends told her it wasn't worthy of her. I once heard her talk in her ordinary voice, which was quite unattractive. So she invented this baby voice. Also, you seldom saw her with her mouth closed, because when it was closed she had a very determined chin, almost a different face."

So was that famous smile the truth, or a masquerade? Then consider this: if you want to dramatise the loss in Dean's death or Brando's withdrawal, it is not hard. Show the world East of Eden or A Streetcar Named Desire. There is no doubt that these guys, no matter their troubles, could deliver the greatest performances of their time. What would you give to see Dean's Hamlet or Brando's Lear? But if you propose to teach a young person today what Marilyn Monroe had, or promised, in a competition that includes Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman and so on, what do you show them? Well, there she is in The Asphalt Jungle, being taught about life by Louis Calhern's corrupt lawyer. And there she is in All About Eve, with her breathless, dumb delivery. And yes, she's cute and promising. And she's (omega) passable in Clash by Night, except that Barbara Stanwyck is much more interesting. She's funny in Hawks' Monkey Business and she carries off the songs in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She's adorable in The Seven Year Itch, but she doesn't seem to get the way the film is making dirty jokes about her behind her back. She's as good as she ever was in Bus Stop, really reaching our emotions. And then there's Some Like It Hot, where she is unique and funny and sad, but nowhere near as smart as either Lemmon or Curtis.

And that's about it. It's an interesting assemblage of minutes and scenes, and I can see why people persevered with her. In Let's Make Love, she slides down a pole and just before singing "My Heart Belongs to Daddy", she says, "My name is Lolita!" Imagine her in that movie, as a grown woman playing the child.

Was she amazingly beautiful or just very sexy? She had a way of being inadvertently suggestive that was an inspiration in a medium depending on voyeurs; and she had a voice made for naughty double meanings. (Of course, that is the package that George Cukor thought was calculated.)

But do you long to see her Portia or her Miss Julie? Or do you have to wonder whether such demanding meetings would ever have come to pass? For, any thorough scrutiny of her professional life reveals her as a terrible source of uneasiness who disrupted schedules, the performances of fellow-actors, the plans of directors in such a way that some people believed it wasn't just shyness or stage fright, but an urge to damage the production itself, because she had come to resent the factory that made films and which only cared to exploit her.

And it wasn't that great men didn't try to rescue or educate her. Elia Kazan had been her lover since before Kazan's pal, Arthur Miller, ever developed a relationship. Kazan was famous both as a womaniser and a great director of raw talent. He said of her lack of education, "Everything was either completely meaningless or completely personal. She had no interest in abstract, formal or impersonal concepts but was passionately devoted to her own life's experiences." As a lover, he said, "She had a bomb inside her. Ignite her and she exploded. Her lover was her saviour." Which doesn't exactly paint a drab picture of Mr Kazan in bed. But Kazan, who discovered Dean and Brando, didn't elect to work with Marilyn.

Arthur Miller was a more tender man. He saw a naïve girl, so perfect physically and so raw intellectually, that a town of cynics was always likely to devour her. In the end, Miller's sense of her delivered a very awkward, artily symbolic film, The Misfits, but soon after he met her, Miller saw the waif who needed to be saved. She was sad because her agent Johnny Hyde had just died. Hyde was her defender and another lover - much older, married and with a family that loathed Marilyn and felt that she had initiated Hyde's fatal heart attack. As Miller himself describes it:

"From where I stood, yards away, I saw her in profile against a white light, with her hair coiled atop her head; she was weeping under a veil of black lace. When we shook hands the shock of her body's motion sped through me, a sensation at odds with the sadness amid all this glamour and the busy confusion of a shot being set up. She would explain later to Kazan that Hyde had died calling her name in a hospital room she had been (omega) forbidden by his family to enter. She had heard him from the corridor, and had left, as always, alone."

As always, alone, yet surrounded by men; the steady object of male attention, yet certain in her orphan way that they would use her and discard her. It was a pattern that set in early, and some said that as she gained in power in the business it was what forced her to be so difficult with others. But you can also see how every man used her as a mirror, finding himself, or what he wanted. It was her lament that she was such a looker no one really examined her.

In history, the same thing has happened. Her uncertain existence only encourages others to express themselves. So there have been two big books that were inspired by Monroe, the one by Norman Mailer, Marilyn, filled with the assurance that if he, Norman, could have met her and had her then he might have saved her. The other, the novel, Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates, is a highly researched gathering of every known incident in a feminist scheme in which the central character somehow gets everything but can do nothing to put off her fate. Near the end, Oates imagines the little girl who nursed her dreams at the movie house in the early 1930s:

"In the darkened movie house! It was her happiest time. Recognizing Grauman's Egyptian Theatre years ago when she'd been a little girl. Those afternoons she hadn't been lonely when Mother was at work for she sat through double features & memorized all she could to tell Mother & Mother was captivated by her breathless accounts of the Dark Prince & the Fair Princess. In Grauman's, she was not to sit near men. And so that afternoon in a row close by two older women with shopping bags she knew she would be safe, & so happy! Though the movie ended with the Fair Princess dying, her golden hair spilled over a pillow & the Dark Prince brooding above her & when the lights came up the women were wiping at their eyes & she wiped at hers, though already the beautiful dead face of the Fair Princess was fading, an image on a screen of less substance than the whirring of a hummingbird's wings."

That's beautiful writing, but it could be any of us; it could be Ms Oates becoming a writer. Can there ever be a better book about Monroe? I doubt it. We are at a distance now where even new research is suspect - so many people have learned to live off Marilyn Monroe stories. A few things seem reliable: that near her end there was a dreadful weekend in Nevada where gangsters passed her around their circle in the most demeaning way. And the discovery of sound tapes where she talks in a voice that is more grown up and intelligent than anything we heard in her movies. These tapes suggest how far her baby persona was an act or a game and a desperate defence.

The facts of the life are stark, yet all ambiguous: the disturbed mother who seems to have attacked her; the lost father; her years in an institution; modelling as a teenager; the nude calendar shot; marriage to a cop, Jim Dougherty, to escape orphanages; a film career, largely at 20th Century Fox, a studio that never liked or trusted her; a second marriage to baseball player, Joe DiMaggio, devoted to her but just as shocked by her lifestyle; stardom; the awful trip to England with Laurence Olivier telling her "Just be sexy" in The Prince and the Showgirl; Arthur Miller; the Kennedy era; "Happy Birthday, Mr President", gift-wrapped in the tightest gown. The death. And then the flood of books, movies and plays about her - our apparent inability to stop thinking about her.

Norman Mailer's Marilyn (1973) grappled with that escape of hers and the clashing evidence of indifference and intrigue in those left behind. And as he mulls it over, you get his heartfelt wish to be beside her. He does wonder about murder:

"There seems next to nothing of such evidence, and we have all the counterproof of Marilyn's instability, and all the real likelihood that she had taken too many barbiturates and was laboured over for hours by frantic medicos trying to save her life, which certainly accounts more simply for many of the discrepancies. Of course, it is also possible a stomach pump was used to remove evidence of what did kill her. Yet to press further upon the small likelihood of murder is to stand in danger of a worse loss. In all this discussion of the details of her dying, we have lost the pain of her death. Marilyn is gone. She has slipped away from us. No force from outside, nor any pain, has finally proved stronger than her power to weigh down upon herself. If she has possibly been strangled once, then suffocated again in the life of the orphanage, and lived to be stifled by the studio and choked by the rages of marriage, she has kept in reaction a total control of her life, which is perhaps to say that she chooses to be in control of her death ."

I suspect that if there were easy answers to the life issues then we would have stopped thinking about her long ago. But as with Dean, Brando, Elvis and Orson there is an abiding perplexity: if they were so good at what they did, so emblematic, why couldn't that power persuade them? Well, one answer is that those who have self-belief - Tom Cruise, say, or Madonna, they're the lucky ones. Except that if you got any one of them alone in the dark, I wonder if they wouldn't say, "Self-belief? Are you crazy?"

There's one thing left, a place where Marilyn was supreme and serene. I think she was almost always unrelaxed doing a movie, putting seconds and words and moves together. She was freer in songs where the melody carried her. But at one fiftieth of a second, she was an explosion: that's why men wanted her, because they saw that instant of the firework igniting in still pictures. Those stills are now said to be worth licensing revenue of $8m a year - reason enough for the lawsuits that now surround the pictures, her name and the shabby memorabilia.

But it was the stills that made her breakthrough, thanks to that rapturous calendar shot where she is stretched out on a diagonal. It's a sweet, tasteful shot on the ruffled red satin of pin-up libido: there's no pubic hair and not an ounce of fat yet. It's just Marilyn with long reddish curls, her head thrown back to look at us. For all of her life she was treasure in stills sessions. Near the end, Milton Greene - another big man in her life - took heartbreaking stills. And then, of course, there are the Andy Warhol images, the stamp that recognises American currency.

I don't doubt there were days and nights where she said to herself, "what will I look like if I make it to 80?", and they were enough to give her the chills. It's alarming that the number of sex goddesses who make it past 36 are pretty few. And Marilyn could have guessed that baseball players and intellectual playwrights were alike - they wanted to talk to her because of her body. And she didn't quite have enough to say to make something out of it. When I say that she represents the beginning of the end of America, that has to do with her half-realisation that there was never going to be a satisfying private life for her. She was a public spectacle, and sooner or later that adoring mass turns ugly. So, she wouldn't wait for that. As always, alone.

What a figure: Vital statistics in the life of Marilyn

14.9m Google hits registered for "Marilyn Monroe"

$5 Amount Monroe was paid for her first modelling job

$125 Weekly wage for her first studio contract, with 20th Century Fox, signed in August 1946

$100,000 Amount paid to Monroe for her final, unfinished film, Something's Got to Give, left

$8m Estimated annual worth of Monroe's celebrity image rights

30 Number of films Monroe appeared in during her lifetime

66 Number of films in which she features as a character played by someone else

300 Estimated number of biographies published on Monroe

1 Monroe's position in Playboy's list of Sex Stars of the 20th Century in 1999, 46 years after she appeared on the cover of the magazine's first ever edition, below

37C-24-35 her "definitive" measurements, according to Celebrity Sleuth magazine

36 Her age when she died, on 5 August 1962