Marilyn is second only to Adolf in the iconography of the Daily Mail. Any gossip concerning her, no matter how trivial or improbable or ancient, seems to make it into the paper, complete with zillions of photos and admiring commentary from the readers. Why the fascination with fifty-year-old tittle-tattle and glamour shots of a long-dead woman?

Today's headline is an SEO special:

Screen siren Marilyn Monroe was so jealous of rival Elizabeth Taylor she ordered naked pool photoshoot to try to eclipse her fame

Of course, there's no evidence in the story that she ordered anything at all.

One striking thing about the gushing comments is that they're mostly from women:


Much of this is 'Olden times were the best or summat' but Marilyn also seems to be a site for debate about women's self-worth, self-reliance and self-sacrifice — subjects that are not always open to discussion, especially for the generation of women that grew up with Marilyn mania.

Blonde bombshell Olivia Wilde channels Marilyn Monroe as she shoots a new Revlon commercial in the streets of Manhattan

"A startling resemblance":





Extra Marilyn in a different story about perfume. That's Marilyn 3 Adolf 1 this week.

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Sick Left-wing Zealot.

The ultimate sex symbol for men. But did Marilyn Monroe only love women? Fifty years after her death, an author who met the star questions her sexual identity

Questions to which the answer is no. Features some tremendously naff writing:




Marilyn is "the ultimate love goddess" while Joan Crawford is "rampantly bisexual" (how does that work?).

There's also some well ropey amateur psychoanalysis:


It's the 'lesbian as failed heterosexual' hypothesis, popular in the dark ages of the 1960s and 70s.

The comments mix disgust at the tarnishing of Marilyn's legacy with the usual veneration of her timeless beauty. And:

Husband left you for a gemini did he, Mary?

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"Now get those trousers off before someone dies!"

'She leaned in and kissed me full on the lips': Marilyn Monroe had a lesbian affair with this 16-year-old, sensational new book claims

I don't see the Mail referring to Kristen Stewart's liaison as 'a straight affair'. Also:

Never mind. The readers are in full candle-in-the-wind mode:


Maybe if you folks stopped clicking on gossipy stories about your idol, the speculation would stop.

There was a piece on Women's Hour this morning discussing if MM was a 'dumb blonde' or just played up to that image.

It was touched briefly upon in that piece that MM was very much a product of her time - if you look at how Hollywood leading ladies were depicted (both in films and in publicity material), they went from smart, equal in intelligence/guts with any man in the 1930s and 40s (think Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, Ingrid Bergman etc), to basically big busts and platinum blonde hair in the 1950s. Whereas with some actresses they retained an image of intelligence (any Hitchcock heroine, Lana Turner, Lauren Bacall etc), Monroe was typified by playing dumb - pretty much the Anna Faris of her day. Unlike a lot of those who died young, she didn't exactly leave a small portfolio of incredible movies, and she died when her career was in decline.

Her 'iconic' image seems to have come from her private life and the manner of/mystery over her death (if you believe that sort of thing). Otherwise we may as well be fed endless articles about people 'recreating that timeless Jayne Mansfield look'.

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

You might be interested in this then:

I think MM is being over-analyzed here. She was a product of the Hollywood machine that churned out actors that fitted the films being produced rather than the other way around. For the women there were the chiseled-chinned manly hunks. For the men, hour-glass figure girls who rely on the hunks to save them.

Compare and contrast with modern films. The male stars are now boyish looking ie de Caprio, Damon, Cruise. And the women? They've toughened up, cropped their hair, got rid of all those unnecessary secondary sexual characteristics and kick male butts.

I blame all those hormones getting into water supplies.

But Andy's point is that the dumb blonde, as the leading female character rather than a comic sidekick, was an invention of the 1950s — a period when gender stereotypes hardened across America (and, by extension, the wealthier bits of Europe). According to that line of argument, Marilyn Monroe was pretty much the embodiment of the new ideal. The evidence that she herself felt straitjacketed by the stereotype adds weight to the (no longer very controversial) view that the 1950s were a miserable time for women in the West.

Marilyn-idolising Mail readers like to believe that Monroe was just a tragic goddess let down by the men in her life. It suits them to think of a great female icon as a passive but impulsive victim smiling dutifully through her suffering. Just don't let her speak for herself.

Why do you think Hollywood is going for the boy/man male role star? And the reverse for women?

Is it? I took a look at the 10 top grossing films for 2012. In the films with male leads, these were played by Robert Downey Jr, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, Christian Bale, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, and Andrew Garfield. Atypical? Maybe. But they're a surprisingly tough-guy crop, and Garfield is the only one under 38 years old.

Just two of the 10 films have a female lead: Jennifer Lawrence, who looks about 12, in Hunger games, and the elfin, distinctly non-kick-ass Kristen Stewart (age: 22) in Snow White. According to Forbes, the highest-earning young female actors are Stewart and Kristen Wiig, who is from the Marilyn tree of provocative comediennes. Among the established stars, the top earners include Cameron Diaz, Sandra Bullock, Julia Roberts and Sarah Jessica Parker — all more ditzy than kick ass — though I'll give you Angelina Jolie.

The average age of a cinema-goer is much lower now than it was when Monroe, Hepburn, Cary Grant et al were the big stars. That might explain the rise of more youthful-looking leads. Hollywood is also slowly responding to cultural trends: 'kick-ass' female characters might be a belated attempt to provide more positive and diverse roles for women, and the fad for regressive male stereotypes (Farrelly brothers, Apatow, etc) is either a reaction to the ebbing of male privilege, or a sad commentary on what adolescent boys find amusing.

Indeed. The bulk of cinema-going and DVD-buying audiences are boys/men aged between 15 and 35 years old. This is borne out by the vast majority of cinema releases.

When a film is released that appeals to people outside that bracket, it tends to do massive, massive business - Mamma Mia! and Titanic to name but two (for all the fan girls lusting after Leo, there were plenty of older people who went to see that film). Gladiator aimed at an older, more mature and literate audience as well. But these are exceptions, not the rule.

It's not necessary to go too far back to see a difference - in the 1970s, the standout male box office leads were Burt Reynolds, Jack Ncholson, Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood, who all unashamedly made films for adults. Same with the female stars of the day - Faye Dunaway, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Glenda Jackson - attractive as they may have been, they played grown up, mature characters. The current juvenilisation has a lot to do with the high concept era ushered in in the 1980s, an awful lot to do with Star Wars, and a good deal to do with the rise of the internet and its attendant culture - suddenly the nerd, or the perpetual manchild became a role model, rather than an object of curiosity or derision.

Anyway, back to Monroe. What is interesting (and again was mentioned in this radio piece - check it out) was how the 1950s dumb blonde image was largely an effect of the war, and the almost enforced conservativeness of the Eisenhower years (women, know your place! and so on), and how it resurfaced in the Reagan era.

_________________
Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

So much of a 'dumb blonde', that she was in a Fritz Lang film, married to one of America's greatest playwrights, and the subject of an iconic Warhol print.

The Mail readers in their sixties now, were just the shallow, mainstream low-brow automatons years back, who only knew her from cheesecake shots and the clichéd, parodying roles of her bigger motion pictures.

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"...now, with a most inhuman cruelty, they who have put out the people’s eyes, reproach them of their blindness..."