EJAC 37 (1) pp. 57–73 Intellect Limited 2018
European Journal of American Culture
Volume 37 Number 1
© 2018 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ejac.37.1.57_1
Agata Łuksza
University of Warsaw
The girl, nature, goddess, or
how Marilyn Monroe became
‘the queen of glamour’?
Abstract
Keywords
‘Did you ever see anything like her?’, Cleveland Amory asked Hedda Hopper while
they were both watching the making of the famous ‘bathtub scene’ in The Seven Year
Itch (Wilder, 1955). How can one explain the phenomenon of Marilyn Monroe –
the ‘queen of glamour’, as her contemporaries called her? This research examines the
case of Marilyn Monroe with reference to the model of glamorous femininity which
has emerged in modern consumer societies. Monroe is understood as a ‘representative character’, not a real person, and the study aims at reconstructing and deconstructing her public image, not at establishing the ‘truth’ about her personal life.
The most influential components of Monroe’s persona are indicated and analysed
based on press material from her lifetime and her repertoire, i.e. the pin-up context,
the association with nature and the ‘goddess’ aspect. It is maintained that these
components accounted for Monroe’s lasting status as an icon of glamour but also
best corresponded to the changes in morality and sexuality that American society
experienced in the 1950s.
femininity
glamour
Hollywood
Marilyn Monroe
pin-up
sexuality
On the occasion of its 65th anniversary, the Festival de Cannes pays tribute to Marilyn Monroe, selected as the icon of the 2012 Festival. […] The
Festival is a temple of glamour and Marilyn is its perfect incarnation.
(Official press release of the Festival de Cannes)
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Agata Łuksza
It has been more than half a century since Marilyn Monroe’s untimely death,
yet she still reigns as the sex goddess and holds the title of the ‘queen of glamour’, as her contemporaries repeatedly called her.
I propose to understand glamour as a hyper-feminine visual code that
marks the female body as an object of desire, an object of consumption and
the bearer of social aspirations, and changes it into a spectacle and a commodity that becomes a visible sign of the longing for a better life. In the process of
glamorization, the ordinary girl-next-door changes into a spectacular fantasy,
while her enchanted body, seemingly attainable but completely out of reach,
luminous, attractive and impenetrable, endows her with power to enchant
crowds (Bailey 1990; Dyhouse 2010; Gundle 2009).
According to Richard Dyer, Monroe’s image should be situated in the
context of such sociocultural phenomena as: the popularity of Freudian ideas
in post-war America, Kinsey’s ground-breaking reports on human sexuality, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (Friedan 2013) foreshadowing the
second wave of feminism, liberalization of cinema censorship or the emergence of rebel stars such as Marlon Brando, James Dean or Elvis Presley.
Monroe’s combination of sexuality and innocence is part of that flux,
but one can also see her ‘charisma’ as being the apparent condensation
of all that within her. Thus she seemed to ‘be’ the very tensions that ran
through the ideological life of 50s America.
(Dyer 2009: 31)
What is important is that in Dyer’s perspective the star’s public image was
rooted in her body, and her body, in turn, endowed her image with authenticity. Thus Monroe’s body enabled American society to act out the conflicts
which existed in the field of morality and sexuality in the 1950s (Dyer 2004:
10–12).
I attempt to indicate those aspects of Monroe’s image which account
for her status as an icon of glamour. I am not interested in the ‘real’ Marilyn
Monroe, but rather I consider her to be a ‘representative character’ who lives in
medias res (Baty 1995: 10–29). Apart from her films and photos, the discourse
on Marilyn Monroe consists of multiple recollections of individual experiences
with her, either actual or imaginary, all of which were, however, enunciated,
not necessarily consciously, according to very specific rules. The question is
not how Monroe actually impacted people as well as not what her true self
was but rather how her influence on others was publicly described and how
she was written about during her lifetime while becoming the ‘world’s glamour goddess’ and the ‘Star of Stars’, as fan magazines in the 1950s named her.
I argue that Monroe’s ultimately glamorous status was achieved by means of
the rhetoric of a girl, the rhetoric of naturalness and the rhetoric of a goddess.
A definition so constructed of ‘the Monroe’ was as paradox-ridden as the
definition of glamour itself, or as the definition of It (Roach 2010: 1–2), and
managed to fuse the competing ideals of femininity in the transitional period
of the 1950s.
Marilyn: The girl
Notwithstanding being a film actress, Monroe’s repertoire directly referred
to the theatre stage and the chorus girl – a glamorous figure par excellence
(Bailey 1996) – just to recall some of her parts: Lorelei in Men Prefer Blondes
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The girl, nature, goddess, or how Marilyn Monroe …
(Hawks, 1953), Elsie from The Prince and the Showgirl (Olivier, 1957) or Sugar
from Some Like It Hot (Wilder, 1959). Furthermore, Monroe’s image was
embedded in the matrix of the pin-up girl, i.e. the twentieth-century ‘sister’ of
a chorus girl and the new embodiment of glamour constructed with a similar
set of symbolic meanings. In the 1960s, when Orrin E. Klapp indicated three
major social types, meaning collective norms of behaviour in America, he
decided on the Good Joe, the Tough Guy and the Pin-up (1962). If the pin-up
is the prevailing social type of femininity, then body and photogenic perfection are the only characteristics of a woman that truly count. Significantly,
Dyer suggests that Klapp could have just as well used the term of ‘a glamour
girl’ (2009: 50).
It was no accident that the stardom of Marilyn Monroe, nicknamed
‘America’s no. 1 pin-up girl’ or ‘the Mmmmmm-mmm girl’, started with
(glamour) modelling. ‘Slick chic’, ‘the most delectable dish of the day’, ‘the
atomic blonde’, ‘the sexy blonde’, ‘the sweetheart of regiments’, ‘young lady
with the chassis’, ‘blonde charmer’, ‘the hottest property in pictures’, ‘the
cutest trick in town’ – this is how Monroe’s contemporaries described her,
repeating words such as voluptuous, shapely, luscious or roundly formed, thus
strengthening the pin-up context and activating the rhetoric of a girl.1 ‘Blond
actress’ was probably the most popular term to designate Monroe. ‘As a blonde
in the 1950s Hollywood film industry, Monroe was constructed as the sexual
and racial embodiment of perfection’, claims Laini Burton (2012: 135). In the
well-established tradition, Monroe’s blonde hair simultaneously connoted
eroticism and purity, both sexual and racial. Her whiteness was a necessary
element of her desirability (Dyer 2004: 39–42), seductive and reassuring at the
same time.
In the article from 1952, Hedda Hopper mentioned Monroe’s childhood
and even her fondness for literature, however, the image of the pin-up was at
the core of her text. Hopper claimed that 20th Century Fox could not keep up
with production of Monroe’s photos and the magazine for soldiers, Stars and
Stripes, put the blonde on the first page every day, which showed how large
the demand for Monroe’s images was among American men ‘from Korea to
Kokomo’ (Hopper 1952: D1). Monroe’s publicity materials in fan magazines
in the first half of the 1950s presented the new star within these exact frames.
In that decade, film fan magazines were widely popular, with Photoplay
and Modern Screen producing 1.2 million copies each every month, and as
such they remained a vital element of the film industry, though they turned
to noncritical reviews, less ambitious stories, and, after the emergence of
Confidential in 1952, more trashy cover lines. ‘For the fan magazines the 1950s
was Marilyn Monroe and it was much else besides’, writes Anthony Slide
(2010: 143), adding that while the period was dubbed ‘The Marilyn Monroe
Era’ and Monroe herself might have been ‘the mistress of the nation’, it was
Elizabeth Taylor who dominated the covers. Nonetheless, Monroe appeared
on an estimated 75 covers, starting with Silver Screen in February 1952 (Slide
2010: 175) – on the cover picture the actress is lying invitingly, with her eyes
half-closed and mouth half-open, in a low-necked and bare shoulder dress.
Monroe’s early publicity materials (1951–52) established her as the epitome
of a glamorous all-American girl. The pin-up-like visual imagery combined
with stories about a persistent, ambitious and hard-working girl with a
modest background and a difficult childhood, a girl who – despite her inherent shyness – was both fame-hungry and love-hungry. This paradox-ridden
narrative, joining sex appeal with morality, career with family, poverty with
1. Based on press
research: The New
York Times, Los
Angeles Times, issues
1952–62, Screenland
(later Screenland Plus
TV-Land), Modern
Screen, issues 1951–62.
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Agata Łuksza
success, continued with little variations during Monroe’s hype as fuelled by
20th Century Fox in the years 1952–55.
In 1954 the United Services Organization asked Monroe to perform
for American soldiers in Korea, where she was supposed to represent an
All-American girl-next-door who was waiting for her beloved man at home.
James F. Orlay from the Second US Infantry Division who had watched
Monroe’s performance in Korea reminisced years after:
Miss Monroe’s visit was the World Series, the Fourth of July and the
Mardi Gras rolled in one. […] It took The Blonde, who looked so fresh,
healthy and American, to raise our spirits and make us feel like men
again. God bless her.
(Good 2014: 219)
This episode in Monroe’s career exposes how deeply the concept of the
All-American girl shaped her image. Hugh Hefner’s magazine Playboy,
established in December 1953, was premised upon the very same model of
femininity.
Just when Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was being successfully shown in cinemas, and 20th Century Fox was about to release another Monroe blockbuster
titled How to Marry a Millionaire, nude calendar photos of the blonde came
to light. The first Playboy issue reprinted images taken by Tom Kelley in 1948
and titled ‘Golden Dreams’, in reference to the model’s hair colour posing
against red satin. And so Marilyn Monroe became the very first Playmate and
enabled Playboy to take off. Obviously, Monroe’s nude pictures caused a scandal, however, the actress commented on it exactly the way Hefner would have
preferred: ‘I am not ashamed of it. I’ve done nothing wrong’ (Zolotow 1961:
105). The calendar story might have initially antagonized the female audience, yet it kept coming back in Monroe’s publicity and in the end it boosted
her popularity. Not only did ‘Golden Dreams’ constantly remind people about
Monroe’s sexual attractiveness, they also served as proof of her decency.
Whenever the story was brought out, it stressed that Monroe sat for Kelley
out of hunger. Being a sex symbol, she was also ‘an unusually straitlaced and
moral young lady’ who hardly ever partied and never fooled around with
Hollywood men (Cronin 1952: 92–93).
The Playboy discourse which defined sex as a natural pleasure and a pretty
girl as a man’s fun companion, and exploited the fantasy of the girl-next-door,
permeated the image of the ‘naturally’ and innocently sexual Marilyn, the
most desirable playmate (Dyer 2004: 25–47). The correspondence between the
gender ideology as promoted by Playboy and the model of femininity which
determined Monroe’s persona was evident already in the 1950s. As early as in
1957, Thomas Harris argued that Monroe was presented primarily as the ‘ideal
playmate’:
Publicists concentrated on her breathy voice, her ‘horizontal walk’, her
revealing dress, her half-closed eyes and half-opened mouth. […] It is
in keeping with the standard studio practice of having Monroe undress,
shower, say and sing suggestive things in her film roles.
(Harris 1991: 43–44)
Harris claimed that placing Monroe within the playmate model was possible
due to her personal situation because it was the lack of family and roots which
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The girl, nature, goddess, or how Marilyn Monroe …
rendered her available. In contrast, the author discussed the image of Grace
Kelly which was grounded in categories of respectability and propriety, proving that her cold and reserved lady-like persona emerged from her origins and
upbringing, as Kelly came from an affluent Catholic family.
Dyer’s analysis of Playboy concludes that ‘the nub of the playboy discourse’
is the assumption that while women stand for sexuality and embody sexual
desires, in fact this means that they serve as vehicles for male sexuality (2004:
38). When we talk about Monroe’s sexuality, we refer not to the body Monroe
herself experienced but the body as experienced – without shame or fear –
by others. As Gloria Steinem writes, Marilyn Monroe ‘was the child-woman
who offered pleasure without adult challenge; a lover who neither judged
nor asked anything in return’(Steinem 2002: 68). While she was publicized
from the very beginning as ‘a girl who has so much glamour it hurts’ and soon
became ‘the most exciting Hollywood star’, she simultaneously appeared as an
‘enchanting child’, to quote Yves Montand (Parsons 1960: 25).
Shame and fear might be considered the primary regulatory mechanisms
of social life which limit and structure human behaviour (Łotman 1977). While
shame regulates behaviour within the group defined as the cultural ‘us’, fear
marks the relationship between ‘us’ and ‘them’, i.e. the others. The model of a
glamorous pin-up as embodied by Marilyn Monroe neutralizes both shame
and fear, and thus legitimizes the experience of sexual pleasure.
As noted by Dyer, the Marilyn Monroe phenomenon was part of a
profound revolution in the sphere of American society’s morality in the 1950s.
Until then, desire and sexual pleasure did not have an autotelic value, as
they were rather perceived as a dangerous source of corruption. This means
that what refrained an American man from breaching the rigorous standards of sexual behaviour (or at least from breaching them openly) was shame
to himself and the members of any group that defined his identity: family,
neighbourhood community, school or work environment. Monroe’s image
was intended to purify that sexual pleasure. The blonde was hypersexual and
hypervisible, she encouraged others to look at her with desire yet remained
innocent and natural.
Furthermore, Monroe – being untroublesome and vulnerable (‘an enchanting child’) – offered an escape from the threat of female sexuality (Dyer 2004:
39). The recurring adjectives regarding Monroe’s description in fan magazines,
as inspired by the studio, were: honest, plain, warm, charming, sensitive, shy.
‘The greatest symbol of sex in our time’ was in fact ‘a good girl’, or even ‘a
homebody’, who longed for her own family. Although a glamour girl should
by definition be single, and the studio was justifiably anxious whether Miss
Monroe would still be sexy after turning into Mrs. Joe DiMaggio, the marriage
became an opportunity to underline Monroe’s gentle and domestic character.
She was the opposite of the Medusa: a spectacle of a disciplined female body
performed for men’s pleasure.
Such a model of femininity was enhanced in Monroe’s films by the type
of men who admired the heroines she played. It would be difficult to call
them sexually attractive, as they were usually ordinary-looking and shy with
women, even slightly emasculated, and thus very different from Monroe’s
lovers off-screen (Banner 2008: 19–20), which is just one of the many paradoxes that constituted Monroe’s successful image. The juxtaposition of glamorous femininity with unimpressive masculinity in Monroe’s pictures was not
about making the average male filmgoers feel bad about themselves; on the
contrary.
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As ‘the Girl’ explains to Richard (played by Tom Ewell), her besotted admirer
in The Seven-Year Itch and likeable ‘hubby’ whose wife and kid left New York
for the holidays, a pretty girl wants exactly such a ‘nice guy’ who is ‘off in the
corner nervous and shy’. Hence, the male spectators could indulge themselves
in a comforting fantasy that Marilyn Monroe was attainable for all of them
(Mobilio 2002: 59). Furthermore, Richard castigates himself, withdraws from
the affair and consciously resigns from satisfying his sexual desires. He does
not have a sexual relationship with his glamorous neighbour, not because she
rejects him, but due to his own moral decision: ‘it’s not that Marilyn Monroe
[…] doesn’t want you; it’s because you, being such a “nice guy,” don’t really
want her’ (Mobilio 2002: 59).
Marilyn: Nature
Marilyn Monroe embodied the new discourse on sexuality, i.e. the playboy
discourse premised on the ideas of innocence, playfulness and naturalness,
which assumed that ‘a woman was there for men’ and released men both from
the social constraints and the threat of female sexuality. In Monroe’s image,
the rhetoric of a girl intertwined with the rhetoric of naturalness, but one
could ask nowadays: Marilyn Monroe and naturalness? In fact, the association between Monroe – a sex symbol – and nature was crucial to the star’s
popularity, as it proved the naturalness of sex. She had to be a dumb blonde,
otherwise the legitimizing and cleansing mechanisms would not have worked
because ‘The dumbness of the dumb blond is by tradition natural, because
it means that she is not touched by the rationality of the world. She is also
untouched by the corruption of the world’ (Dyer 2004: 33–34).
The context of nature was conjured in various ways. The reviews of
Niagara, which premiered in 1953, provide a good example. The Los Angeles
Times wrote: ‘Twentieth Century Fox makes the fullest use yet of Niagara Falls
and Marilyn Monroe, both of whose scenic attractions are exploited in shimmering Technicolor in Niagara’ (Scheuer 1953: 11). The review confirms that
the promotional strategy turned out to be successful: the Niagara trailer juxtaposed the images of the tumultuous falls and a seductive Marilyn Monroe,
concluding that they were ‘[t]he two most electrifying sights in the world’. The
New York Times enlisted them both as the two new wonders of the world, praising the producers that they ‘made full use of both the grandeur’ of the falls and
of the actress. Monroe’s acting skills were marginalized or even mocked, and
not only in the case of Niagara, but also in her other early films, when the ‘awe
of her physical beauty seemed to demand […] condemnation of her acting
ability’ (Scheibel 2013: 7).
As we read in The New York Times:
Perhaps Miss Monroe is not the perfect actress at this point. But neither
the director nor the gentlemen who handled the cameras appeared to
be concerned with this. They have caught every possible curve both in
the intimacy of the boudoir and in equally revealing tight dresses.
(A. W. 1953: 20)
Marilyn’s body – just like Niagara Falls – was a stunning wonder of nature,
created to be looked at. Framed as a ‘natural’ object of desire, it appeared to
be a living paradox: an embodiment of artificial nature or, in other words, of
glamorous nature. In this vein, Monroe’s (in)famous wiggle in Niagara, which
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The girl, nature, goddess, or how Marilyn Monroe …
earned her a wave of criticism for ‘overdoing’ sex, turned out to be her ‘natural’
way of walking caused by an ankle injury in her teenage years (Skolsky 1953:
66). Similarly, Screenland convinced his readers that Monroe happened ‘to be
so amply endowed with curvaceous allures’ that she didn’t need ‘to aid nature
in her appeal’, and that the studio simply let her be ‘her natural, beautiful, sexy
self’ (Benedict 1954: 29, 58–59).
While the blonde was parallelled with the wonders of nature, she simultaneously opposed the world of technology. When in July 1958 Monroe landed
in Los Angeles on time, she still managed to arrive half an hour late for the
press conference that was held in front of the plane. ‘I’m so sorry. I was asleep.
I’ve never had such a wonderful sleep on a plane’ – she explained. The press
inquired whether they had not woken her up before the landing, and she
answered: ‘Oh, yes. But I dropped off again, you know’ (Smith 1958: 10). First,
this scene activated the stereotype of a dumb blonde who – as Dyer perfectly
coined it – was ‘not touched by the rationality of the world’. Second, the
biological need for sleep and regeneration ruptured the artificially regulated
space-time of the airport, which was subordinated to machines and arbitrarily structured by the schedule of arrivals and departures. Marilyn existed in a
different time realm, one that was extendable, unhurried and natural, and as
such defied the precious ‘techno-time’ which was accurately measured, strictly
rationed and fast-flowing.
The description of Monroe’s late arrival is followed by a description of her
appearance:
[…] an apparition of white materialized in the doorway. White hair
swirl in the prop wash of another plane; white silk shirt open at the
powdered white throat; white, tight silk skirt, white shoes, white gloves.
Marilyn Monroe blinked big sleepy eyes at the world. She brushed a
hunk of white hair from her forehead and began descending – slowly
and wickedly – down the steps.
(Smith 1958: 10)
There she was, a temptress in white: the innocent one who elicited desire
but at the same time rendered it guilt-free. Walking down the steps, Monroe,
dressed in a tight skirt, briefly acknowledged that she might have put on a
little weight but she did not care for the ample, balloon-style dresses as they
were – quote – ‘too unorganic’. Clearly then, Monroe must have preferred
‘organic’ skirts: tight-fitting dresses that underlined the waist, hips and
buttocks, and therefore demanded a perfectly shaped body as well as constant
self-discipline and attention while wearing them. The material stretches at
every step, the skirt rolls up when one crosses her legs, generally the dress
hinders spontaneous body movement. But no other cut would expose the
curves of the female body to such an extent. Organicity of the outfit understood as such belongs to the order of the glamorous nature, and Monroe – all
in white, in a tight skirt, ‘slowly and wickedly’ descending the gangway – best
illustrated how sexuality was interwoven with naturalness in order to simultaneously arouse desire and give absolution.
Monroe’s return to Hollywood in 1958 after a self-imposed ‘exile’ to New
York City offers an interesting starting point of comparison between her image
in general interest newspapers and fan magazines. Because the fan magazines
cooperated with the studios, they hardly ever published critical materials,
particularly in the review section. And while Modern Screen or Screenland did
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Agata Łuksza
not claim that Monroe was a great actress with a brilliant mind, on the one
hand they rarely commented on her acting at all (which would be against
Monroe’s persona as approved by the studio) and, on the other, assured that
she was ‘an open-minded learner’ and ‘a perfectionist’ who had ‘a native intelligence’. They did not, however, refrain from quoting the common assumptions and derisive opinions by other stars about Monroe’s alleged dumbness
and lack of acting skills.
By default, the fan magazines were bound to explore stars’ private lives.
In his article for Los Angeles Times, Jack Smith recreated what he probably
witnessed at the airport: ‘an apparition of white’, which he understood and
enunciated as the materialization of the Myth of Marilyn. Unlike fan magazine
journalists who were paid for exposing the stars’ ‘true nature’ in a controlled
way, he did not dwell on her state of mind and soul. In Maxine Block’s text
published in Screenland plus TV-Land, suggestively titled ‘The Two Faces of
Marilyn Monroe’, the description of Monroe’s ‘apparition’ at the airport (in fact
an apparent rip-off of Smith’s article) serves only as an introduction to further
inquiries about the ‘truth’ behind the Myth, about her ‘second face’ which ‘has
nothing to do with the accepted standard Hollywood blonde sexpot’ (Block
1959: 22–23). ‘Beneath false lashes’ fan magazines inevitably found the look
of an aspiring and love-hungry child, thus underlining Monroe’s vulnerability
and innocence. I found one truly critical piece of material in Modern Screen on
the blonde which implied that she was actually a shrewd who was using men –
including Joe DiMaggio – for her own publicity, and who got ‘a little big in
the head’ and in the end ‘disenchanted’ her own fans that were appreciative of
‘honor, selflessness and love’ (Cronin 1955: 34, 76). Unsurprisingly, this article
appeared when Monroe broke her contract with 20th Century Fox and left for
New York.
Contrary to the fan magazines, which wrote about a sensitive and eagerto-learn glamour queen, the general interest press opted for a more onedimensional yet no less paradoxical image as replicated in Monroe’s films by
appreciating her voluptuous body, challenging her acting skills and ostentatiously ignoring her mind and ‘soul’.
Marilyn: The Goddess
Finally, I would like to discuss the god-like component of Monroe’s persona
that was activated to describe her influence on the crowds and her ability to
dazzle others in public situations. Such a narrative corresponded to Monroe’s
elevated status among Hollywood stars. The importance of the blonde was
manifested in press materials about other actresses, where Monroe functioned as a point of reference. The fan magazines described Alice Faye Harris
as ‘the pre-Marilyn Monroe doll of 20th Century Fox film musical’, Mamie
Van Doren as ‘the likeliest challenge to Marilyn Monroe’, and Lee Remick as
the ‘new Monroe in the offing’; and whenever introducing foreign stars they
also invoked the blonde: Martine Carol was ‘the Marilyn Monroe of France’,
Renate Mannhardt – ‘of Germany’, Silvana Mangano – ‘of Italy’. She quickly
became ‘the most widely discussed’ actress in America, simply ‘The Monroe’,
or ‘M.M.’, ‘the one and only’ who set the benchmark for others.
Being ‘Glamour Girl Number One’ is not the same as being just a glamour
girl. There are many similarities between the definition of glamour I propose,
mostly with reference to Peter Bailey’s research (1990, 1996), and the definition of It as coined by Joseph Roach (2010), however, they are not exactly
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The girl, nature, goddess, or how Marilyn Monroe …
identical phenomena. Both glamour and It are grounded on paradoxes, both
point to the indirect experience, and both involve the modern engines of fame
(however, Roach’s analysis concerns the long eighteenth century, while Bailey
or Gundle opt for the nineteenth century). Nonetheless, glamour is but one
aspect of It, which is by definition disturbingly abnormal and thus overshadowed by abjection. A glamour girl is supposed to be a regular girl, enchanting,
indeed, yet in the end domesticated. It is clear that by changing from a glamour girl into ‘the glamour queen’, Marilyn Monroe acquired what Roach calls
‘stigmata’, which marked her as a vulnerable object of loathing and suffering.
I would understand glamour girls (starting with the nineteenth-century
barmaids, actresses, chorus girls) in terms of the serial products of modern
marketing which attempts to capture and replicate It for a commercial profit.
Therefore, of the three ‘manifestations of It’ as indicated by Roach (2010: 3),
two are also basic characteristics of glamour, i.e. ‘public intimacy’, which is
an illusion of availability that results from enhanced visibility of the glamour
object with its actual remoteness, and (to a lesser degree), the ‘synthetic experience’, meaning the vicariousness of the experience. What truly makes the
difference is the range of the ‘It-Effect’. While glamour girls are eye-catching,
enchanting, even mesmerizing, they are also interchangeable and forgettable,
such as the Ziegfeld Girls in the inter-war reviews or Playboy playmates. This
is not the case of ‘the glamour queen’ who triggers off the It-Effect, defined
by Roach as ‘personality-driven mass attraction’ or the ‘deifying reception’
(2010: 3, 44). The concept of the ‘It-Effect’ enables Roach to parallel the experience of It with a religious experience and to explore what Chris Rojek
cautiously called a ‘partial convergence between religion and celebrity’ (Rojek
2001: 58). I do not discuss if indeed the celebrities took the place of gods and
‘shamans’ in modern societies, or if we can talk about It in terms of ‘secular magic’ – these questions are thoroughly covered in Rojek’s book. What I
claim is that the discourse about the queen of glamour needs stories about the
divine-like ‘It-Effect’ she supposedly inspires.
Image number one: the epiphany. In November 1954 a few chosen could
witness the making of the ‘bath scene’ with the naked Marilyn in the bath on
the set of The Seven Year Itch. The actress appeared wrapped in a huge towel,
then she dropped it and entered the bath behind a screen. An initial murmur
of disappointment – because of the screen – instantly changed into a cry of
delight when the screen was removed. ‘A lot of bubbles’, said Billy Wilder, and,
shortly after, as Hedda Hopper writes, ‘a soapy froth rises like a cloud framing
Marilyn’s rosy face and arms, her moongold hair in disarray’ (Hopper 1954:
B6). ‘No soap on the legs and feet’, Wilder added consciously, but he was the
only one who was still working. Victor Moore, who was acting with Monroe in
this scene, seemed to be in a trance and forgot about his role. The director tried
to reorganize the crew, who remained motionless and speechless at the sight
of the Monroe in a bathtub. Marilyn’s co-star, Tom Ewell, confessed to Hopper:
‘I’m here purely in the capacity of a technical adviser. Wouldn’t miss it for the
world’. And Cleveland Amory asked her: ‘Did you ever see anything like her?’
Image number two: the riots. In July 1956 Marilyn Monroe took part in
a large press conference at London Airport, which is today’s Heathrow. Her
husband, Arthur Miller, her co-star Laurence Olivier and his wife Vivien
Leigh were also present to promote Monroe’s and Olivier’s production The
Prince and the Showgirl. Marilyn sat down and crossed her legs. She slightly
pulled up her ‘organic’ skirt, revealing thus a large part of her left thigh. This
was too much for the British press. One of the photographers crashed into a
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Agata Łuksza
newsreel camera, another leaned forward and fell onto his face. As the Los
Angeles Times reports: ‘A wall of photographers plunged towards Miss Monroe
like the forward line of a football team. Police stopped them. The news conference began’ (Anon. 1956: 1). But those at the back were trying to fight their
way closer to Marilyn. Another cameraman fell on the floor and someone
trampled on his hand. The crowd wedged the celebrities into a corner, where
they barricaded themselves behind a soft drink stand.
According to those press materials, the presence of or even a glimpse of
Marilyn’s naked body spellbound and entranced the audience. These kinds of
descriptions of Monroe’s ‘It-Effect’ were also regularly published in fan magazines, particularly in the period of 1953–55, when journalists reported that ‘it took
ropes and policemen’ to hold back the crowd that had gathered either to watch
Monroe perform or to welcome her at the airport. We might never be absolutely
sure whether or not Monroe’s appearance truly hypnotized people and caused
‘near-riots’, but undoubtedly her ability to induce such an effect was a pivotal
element of her publicity. The readers were to believe that Monroe, or to be more
precise, Monroe’s body, reformulated social situations because it was unlike
anything else, unparallelled and unique: ‘Did you ever see anything like her’?
Amory’s comment directly brings to mind the language of religious experience as analysed and applied by Rudolph Otto, who writes that the numinous
is ‘wholly other’ and ‘beyond the sphere of the intelligible’ (Otto 1950: 25–26).
Because the numinous evokes stupor and blank amazement and induces a
feeling of awe and dependence, Otto coins the term mysterium tremendum to
describe it (1950: 13–19). However, in Otto’s perspective the numinous has a
double nature: it is not only mysterium tremendum but also mysterium fascinans, where fascinans refers to ‘the Dionysiac-element in the numen’ which
entrances a person, ‘captivates and transports him [sic!] with strange ravishment, rising often enough to the pitch of dizzy intoxication’ (1950: 31). The
concomitance of tremendum and fascinans constitutes the uniqueness and
peculiarity of the numen, which entices the tremor of both fear and delight.
While within the 1950s’ press discourse Monroe’s body was unlike anything
else, it did not belong to the realm of thus understood numinous, though it
might have resembled the numen in certain aspects. In the case of Monroe,
there was no tremendum element, just the fascinating element, because her
body was from the very beginning a ‘body for’: it solely tempted the audience with its availability, it might have been divine but it did not induce the
fear or humbleness that resulted from the experience of tremendum. This was
the difference between the goddess and the goddess of glamour, between the
ancient Venus and the ‘contemporary Venus’. Monroe’s presence was supposed
to evoke an interpersonal enchantment, the collective state of joyous intoxication which was not shadowed by fear. Monroe’s identification as ‘the queen of
glamour’ both confirmed and induced such an ‘It-Effect’. Her glamorized body
carried fantasies about an objectified body that a priori existed for other bodies
yet remained completely unreachable. In this perspective it seemed perfectly
logical to assume that witnessing the materialization of Monroe’s body must
have been reminiscent of a religious experience.
The body
The discourse on Marilyn Monroe – particularly in the general interest press –
focused on her body and, by using the rhetoric of a girl, goddess and naturalness, secured the actress the everlasting title of the icon of glamour. Of course,
66 European Journal of American Culture
The girl, nature, goddess, or how Marilyn Monroe …
the press also introduced other threads into the story about Marilyn, such
as her difficult past, aspirations and longings. However, these were just the
optional parts of the narrative, while Monroe’s body served as the organizing
axis and the dominant context. Thomas Wiseman wrote, after his interview
with the star in March 1956, that ‘[t]alking to Miss Monroe, her celebrated
body is like an open secret between you. You may not actually talk about it,
but you both know it is there’ (Wiseman 1957: 211); for instance, even though
Barbara Berch Jamison grounded her article in a conversation she had had
with Monroe, she started the text by describing the way in which the male
audience reacted to the scene from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with Monroe/
Lorelei singing ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’. ‘“Well-l-l-l,” hoorahed the
boys in the front row – and in the back row – and in the middle rows – and
on the sides, “this is great! Wonderful!”’ (Jamison 1953: X5). Jamison could
not stop herself from either describing Monroe’s looks during the interview
or from discussing her relationships with men. And although Monroe herself
brought up the issue of her ‘soul’, the journalist did not bother to follow it and
just pragmatically remarked that ‘the studio is keeping her [Monroe’s] soul in
reserve’ (Jamison 1953: X5).
Fan magazines explored Monroe’s emotional life much more elaborately
and seemingly did not shun her ‘soul’, yet at least until 1956 any serious narrative about the blonde was neutralized by the accompanying pin-up style
pictures. Furthermore, as the fan magazines cultivated yellow journalism, they
reduced Monroe’s ‘soul’ to the sensational elements of her childhood and love
life. Monroe’s mind remained uncharted, while stories about her marriages,
miscarriages and romances, which in many ways revolved around her body,
piled up.
‘I had to prove that Audrey [Hepburn] has sex and that Marilyn is an
actress’ (Scheuer 1954: D1), said Billy Wilder shortly after he finished working on Sabrina and The Seven Year Itch. This comparison between Audrey and
Marilyn was by no means accidental and did not only result from Wilder’s
professional agenda. In response to Monroe’s popularity, the major American
studios tried to launch their ‘own’ female stars who could compete with
Monroe. Most of the time they came up with some sort of Monroe replica, such
as Kim Novak who was promoted by Columbia (Grunes 2002: 189). However,
Paramount sent to fight for the audience not an ‘ersatz Monroe’ but an ‘AntiMarilyn’ or ‘Non-Marilyn’ – Audrey Hepburn. The contrast between the public
images of both actresses as well as opinions regarding their acting abilities
could not have been sharper. Hepburn (née Edda van Heemstra HepburnRuston) was lauded as a gifted and competent professional, while Monroe
‘seemed the self-deluded, somewhat frantic acting wannabe’ (Grunes 2002:
191). Hepburn and Monroe differed in almost any measure: Monroe was an
All-American girl-next-door (glamour), Hepburn – a sophisticated, high-class
European lady (chic). There is something perverse in the fact that Hepburn
is mostly remembered for her performance as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at
Tiffany’s – based on Truman Capote’s short-story – if one takes into account
that the writer claimed he had created the character of Holly with only one
woman in mind – Marilyn Monroe.
Billy Wilder failed to convince critics of Monroe’s acting talent, as evidenced
by The Seven Year Itch reviews. Bosley Crowther wrote that Monroe ‘does not
perform as a great actress; she performs as a great physique’, further arguing
that Monroe did not have to act, just ‘wiggle, bat her eyes, twist her mouth in
those oval contortions and speak vapidly in that tooth-paste voice’ (1955: X1).
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Agata Łuksza
A harsh conclusion about Monroe’s performance reveals how undervalued the
burdensome part of the glamorous fantasy she played on- and off-screen was:
‘[s]he is merely a passing example of a sexy, empty-headed dame […]. (One
pauses to speculate fondly on what Audrey Hepburn, say, might have done
with this role)’ (Crowther 1955: X1). Crowther seemed to acknowledge that
Monroe had some acting potential which could have blossomed provided she
had been given roles exploiting her physical attractiveness to a lesser degree.
However, she still would have been no competition to, say, Audrey Hepburn,
but, more importantly, one has to ask why Crowther was so convinced that
Marilyn Monroe did not act in her films? If she did not act then she must have
simply been herself, if her performance was not identified as performance
then one must assume she was a sweet, dumb blonde off-screen. Why did
Wilder have to prove that Marilyn was an actress at all? The actress’ personality merged with her persona, embedded in the pin-up context, consistently
constructed in a string of similar film roles, supported by the media discourse
and kindled by 20th Century Fox, and often by Monroe herself. It took decades
to finally appreciate Monroe’s acting skills and to identify her public image in
terms of the conscious performance of ‘the Blonde’, and even to interpret this
performance as a parody which, in fact, undermined the glamorous model of
femininity (Banner 2012; Burton 2012).
Monroe’s decision to leave Hollywood for acting studies in New York
aroused great confusion. Crowther wrote that it was as important as the Suez
Crisis (Crowther 1956b: X1). This movement in space was a clear attempt of
a fundamental revision of Monroe’s public image. As one of Modern Screen’s
writers waggishly put it, ‘Marilyn would like her mind to be as developed as
the rest of her’ (Tusher 1956: 24–25). When the actress returned to the big
screen in the subtle role of Cheri in The Bus Stop (Logan, 1956), Crowther
did not hide his surprise: ‘Hold onto your chairs, everybody, and get set for
a rattling surprise. Marilyn Monroe has finally proved herself an actress’
(Crowther 1956a: F19). Perhaps Crowther’s approval for Monroe’s acting in
Logan’s film stemmed from the uniqueness of the Cheri character in Monroe’s
repertoire at that time. Yes, Cheri was a showgirl, but a showgirl stripped of
glamour, almost glamorous or no longer glamorous, harassed, sad-eyed and
forced to work in a honky-tonk.
Nonetheless, Marilyn Monroe primarily remained ‘the queen of glamour’ and the national sex symbol. Less than a year after the premiere of The
Bus Stop, the press admired Monroe’s attitude at the British court, where she
was presented to Queen Elizabeth II: ‘[e]ven on that high-faluting occasion
her dress was conspicuously low, and her mouth open. Our girl is still with
us’ (Berg 1957: 24). When she finally got back to Hollywood, the Los Angeles
Times published an article titled ‘Marilyn is back! She’s the same old Marilyn –
tardy, temperamental and terrific’ (Hyams 1958: TW10), and Louella Parsons
affirmed Modern Screen’s readers that even though Monroe was ‘wearing
high-necked suits and making a movie with Oliver’ she was still ‘cute and
sweet – yes, and shy!’ (Parsons 1956: 17). What is striking in these texts is
the concern that living away from Hollywood could have changed Monroe,
affected her appearance and behaviour, thus diluting and destabilizing the
model of glamorous femininity which she so perfectly embodied. Statements
such as ‘our girl is still with us’ or ‘she’s the same old Marilyn’ sounded like
a sigh of relief. Nobody cared about Norma Jean – whoever that woman
was – but Marilyn was a crucial element of the American identity. ‘Our girl’
was honest, hyper-feminine and ‘naturally’ sexy, and would remain that way
68 European Journal of American Culture
The girl, nature, goddess, or how Marilyn Monroe …
whether she would have to bow at the British court or associate with the
intellectual elite of New York.
Conclusions
After Monroe’s tragic death, Crowther acknowledged that the Hollywood
industry had created a symbol of femininity, which eclipsed the actress herself:
‘Mention her name or, at one time, even the magical initials, M. M., and the
image of the shapely, soft, blonde charmer would seductively swim into mind’
(Crowther 1962: 13). The columnist did not discuss whether Monroe was a
victim or a beneficiary of her own glamorization, he solely tried to detect
the system of meanings which produced and supported such an image of
the actress (and in which Crowther himself actively participated, though he
conveniently omitted his part). Soon, however, there appeared a tendency to
perceive Monroe as Hollywood’s victim: ‘[b]ut although views differed as to
who or what had condemned and finally executed her [Monroe], Hollywood
was far and away the most favored villain’ (Luce 2002: 84). Suddenly, the
reconstruction of a difficult childhood and complicated relationships with
influential men as well as an in-depth analysis of Monroe’s physical and
mental health were necessary to deal with this semiotic catastrophe which
was the tragic death of the queen of glamour and the irreversible ruin of her
enchanted body. During Monroe’s lifetime, her tough childhood experiences
and humble origins legitimized the American Dream, however, after her
alleged suicide they changed into a key to understanding the sombre mysteries of American culture and politics. This is when the narrative about Monroe
had to open up to new meanings and interpretations. Monroe ceased to be
solely the icon of the (falsely) unproblematic 1950s and started to exist also as
a sign of the hidden conflicts of this decade, and as such she became a harbinger of the turbulences and disappointments of the 1960s. Therefore, Marilyn
Monroe incorporates both the bright and dark side of the American project, its
opportunities, costs, traps and challenges:
In and as the past, she is the poster girl of the 50s: a fixed feminine
identity in a legible representational order […]. Marilyn is the womanly
woman who represents, albeit playfully, a deliciously innocent American
character. But in her death and resurrection into the present and future,
she is the unsolved mystery of the early 60s […].
(Baty 1995: 80)
Initial traces of this shift in the image of the ‘American project’ as embodied by Marilyn Monroe can already be traced during her lifetime. In October
1953, Screenland posed a strangely prophetic question whether Marilyn would
‘escape the sex hex’ (Gulman 1953: 29). The journalist described how ‘fame
and misfortune’ came together in the lives of the most fascinating women in
the Hollywood history, such as to Jean Harlow or Clara Bow. However, even
though at that time Monroe was already counted among ‘a handful’ of those
legendary few ‘girls with that indefinable extra ingredient’, Gulman argued
that the star would ‘defy the jinx’, claiming that ‘everything about the sexy
blonde makes her a one-of-kind original’, so even ‘her destiny’ would be
different (1953: 62–63). Somehow, she was not wrong… despite touching on
the subject of ‘a tradition of trouble and tragedy’, Gulman’s article was written
in an optimistic tone and upheld Monroe’s image as a successful girl with a
www.intellectbooks.com 69
Agata Łuksza
bright future ahead. Nevertheless, in September 1960 Modern Screen published
a hardly promotional article about Monroe which not only acknowledged
her ‘prima donna’ behaviour, that by tradition was denied by the paper but
also ‘revealed’ the reasons behind it – the fear of a mental illness (Cole 1960).
Modern Screen asserted that Monroe’s entire family from her mother’s side
had suffered from mental disorders, therefore, since her early years the actress
was haunted by ‘the ghost of insanity’. Furthermore, the article suggested that
Monroe had been sexually molested as a child. Although the paper did not
mention this subject again in the following materials on Monroe in November
and December 1960, which focused on her alleged affair with Yves Montand,
indeed this dark story marked the beginning of a new decade and, as a matter
of fact, a new era in American culture.
In the 1950s, public discourse on Monroe included less or more verified
components of her privacy, especially her modest background, because they
helped to develop the image of ‘the queen of glamour’ who had emerged from
the girl-next-door, thus incarnating the American Dream. Her thigh could
dazzle the crowds, yet she was just a sweet, innocent and vulnerable neighbour. Glamour works thanks to contradictions, and Marilyn Monroe as its
queen, endowed with the inexplicable It, consisted of paradoxes. By absorbing
numerous pairs of contradictions, such as uniqueness and typicality, nature
and artifice, sex appeal and innocence, silliness and diligence, career and
marriage, Monroe combined different visions of femininity and answered to
everybody’s dreams.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland, under grant
number 2014/13/N/HS2/02737; Glamour, Femininity, Performance: Actress as an
Object of Desire.
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Suggested citation
Łuksza, A. (2018), ‘The girl, nature, goddess, or how Marilyn Monroe became
‘the queen of glamour’?’, European Journal of American Culture, 37:1,
pp. 57–73, doi: 10.1386/ejac.37.1.57_1
Contributor details
Dr Agata Łuksza is an assistant professor in the Institute of Polish Culture
at the University of Warsaw. She is the author of Glamour, kobiecość, widowisko. Aktorka jako obiekt pożądania (Warsaw University Press, Theatre Institute
2016). Her research interests include: the history of late nineteenth and early
72 European Journal of American Culture
The girl, nature, goddess, or how Marilyn Monroe …
twentieth-century theatre, particularly theatre fandom history and women’s
history; gender, body and sexuality; popular and American culture.
Contact: Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, Krakowskie
Przedmieście 26/28, 00-927 Warsaw, Poland.
E-mail: agata.luksza@uw.edu.pl
Agata Łuksza has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.
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