Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh: Yes, this is the third time I've run this photo. I just like it. Two young couples. Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and thei...He's going to be buried in the plot next to Marilyn Monroe.
How unfortunate for Monroe, but how oddly appropriate in a way.
Hefner nearly ruined Monroe's career by running her as Playboy's first centerfold, but she sure managed to accidentally boost his career in the same fashion. The fact that the introductory issue of the magazine didn't torpedo Monroe was due to Life magazine running the photo first, in a smaller form, as a glamour shot of some sort. It was an intentional act on Life's part to try to save her career, and it worked. But the thousands of men who wanted to seek Monroe naked so that they could. . . well anyway, worked for Playboy too. It was a gamble on Hefner's part as he had to buy the images from a vendor who had them, they were not new but she had posed in her original name at the time, when he didn't have a lot of cash. The fact that a glamorous actress was the subject of the centerfold, rather than a prostitute (whether people realize it or not, the subjects of those magazines prior to Playboy and still for much of pornography today are prostitutes) meant it was off to a less trashy superficiality than was the standard at the time.
But what became of Monroe? She was a troubled person to say the least. Defined by her image, she became a captive of it. She was never all that mentally stable to start with, but she does not seem to have been a happy person. I accept that her death was an accident, but it was an accident in some ways that people should have seen coming. She was unlikely to gracefully make the transition from youth to middle age to old age and she didn't. It's sad. And tragic.
Well, she's been preserved forever in the American memory as a sleepy eyed barely clad beauty in her twenties and even now adorns countless t-shirts and, bizarrely, even shows up in an increasing number of tattoos on women. How Monroe, who never would have tattooed herself and who of course lived in an era when women did not get tattoos ends up as a tattoo for women is truly odd in and of itself. But all of that just pertains to an image. The truth is that in some ways her image deprived her of an actual life, after making her early life rich, after having been desperately poor. She died alone.
Hefner died old in comparison, having profited first from Monroe's image and then from the naked images of hundreds of other female subjects, all of whom have to trod Monroe's path in some fashion in the end. We should pray that they do and have endured it better.
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