It’s mostly ebbed, but for a while there, women on my Facebook feed were routinely posting images of Marilyn Monroe with inspirational quotes that she’d supposedly said. She almost never had, of course; that’s the “inspirational quote paired with celebrity” trap of the internet, after all. But it has always struck me as odd that she was the choice to be inspired by. I always kind of wanted to ask the people posting them if they knew anything about her life. Or, in some cases, if they’d ever even seen one of her movies.
On one level, the life of the woman born Norma Jean Mortenson is the kind of rags-to-riches story a lot of women aspire to. She had a hard childhood. Her mother was a paranoid schizophrenic. She was illegitimate, and the identity of her father is unknown to this day. (It wasn’t her mother’s second husband, listed as her father on the birth certificate.) She spent her childhood bouncing around foster homes, her mother’s home, and an orphanage. She married at sixteen to avoid returning to the orphanage. She worked in a munitions plant during World War II. By 1946, she was modelling; a few months after signing with an agency, she had a contract with 20th Century Fox. 1950 saw bit parts in two major films, Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve. She went from being a nobody to being one of the biggest stars in the world within a few short years of that.
On the other hand, even at the height of her success, she wasn’t what I would call an inspiration. She may well have inherited some mental illness. She was definitely an alcoholic and a drug addict. She was plagued by low self-esteem. Most of her early successes seem to have been tied to sleeping with the right men. It seems impossible to tell now if she was intelligent or not; people who knew her made claims both ways. It’s true that her lines were scattered all over the set during the filming of Some Like It Hot because she couldn’t remember them, but was that a lack of intelligence or the result of her drug use?
So at best, she’s a complicated figure who seems most likely to have killed herself at the age of thirty-six. (Yes, I’ve heard the other theories; the suicide one is best supported by the autopsy.) She wasn’t known as an intellectual heavyweight. She wasn’t known as a great humanitarian. She wasn’t even known as a great actress. Arguably, she belongs on my “could act but didn’t always” list, and mostly, she was called on to act like Marilyn Monroe. Which is, frankly, kind of an offensive caricature, if you want my opinion. So what’s with the images?
I mean this as a legitimate question, not a rhetorical one. I have a few guesses, but I’m otherwise at a loss. When I think of admirable women who we should be quoting to feel better about ourselves, Marilyn Monroe doesn’t make the list. Hell, I’ve already outlived her, and while I had a better childhood, I’m pretty sure I’ve had a worse adulthood and almost certainly have more severe mental illness, though I don’t think we’ll ever be able to be sure about hers. Of course, I’m also a lot more obscure than she is, so I don’t expect to get quoted.
But okay, why Marilyn Monroe and not, say, Audrey Hepburn? Audrey Hepburn was also beautiful, and she also had a seriously troubled childhood—you kind of have to play the “five years in the occupied Netherlands” card, here—and she also had troubled relationships in adulthood. However, she also did a hell of a lot with her life; even now, more than twenty years after her death, the charitable foundation that bears her name is raising funds to help children around the world. I would also argue that Audrey Hepburn was a better actress, but if we’re going there, we can all doubtless name a fair number of women who should be considered inspirational.
I guess the reason I don’t find the alleged Monroe quotes to be all that inspirational is that, in the end, she didn’t overcome much of anything. She was killed by her own personal demons before the age of forty. To this day, her legacy, rightly or wrongly, is of her face and body, not her mind and talent. I pity her. I pity her quite a lot. I don’t say these things with disdain; I say them with sympathy. But certainly I do not say them with admiration.