The Representation between Marylin Monroe and the media during the 1950s.

"So it would have been Marilyn Monroe's 75th birthday on June 1. There have been so many commentaries on Marilyn over the years, all sorts of takes that represent all sorts of era's attitudes about women. It's interesting to look at Marilyn from the point of view of 2001. Marilyn was so apple pie, so American. It was Marilyn, apple pie and Jimmy Stewart. [laughs] But by now her photographic image has been exploited over and over again--to such a point that it doesn't have anything to do with her. The thing that comes to mind from my point of view as an actress--and as somebody who has also been called a sex symbol and has had to live with that label--is that she said she didn't like being a 'thing.' And that's exactly what she's become. Whether it was Marilyn or Elvis, you had those one-dimensional images that didn't allow people behind the facade to breathe. Today it's different.
In fact, Marilyn's main gift was her talent as a comedienne. Her vulnerability was so exaggerated in the persona she created, that it was, in fact, a caricature. Not that she wasn't vulnerable. I'll go further and say she was frightened, with a tenuous grasp on any kind of identity. So she sort of leaned into The Voice and The Walk, and that made her almost hypnotic. Let's face it: What she found was a way to get power through a passive-aggressive situation-very sexual, very available, in an exaggerated way.
I remember when I first saw pictures or her as a young girl--my father never allowed us to have any tabloid magazines in our house. But I had a girlfriend who literally had stacks of them--like five feet high--and I used to be over there all the time seeing all these pictures of the people that I liked. Tony Curtis was the cute guy, and Marilyn Monroe was Marilyn Monroe. There were so many beautiful people in those magazines that one wonders, 'What was it about Marilyn that made her stand out?' There is no question that she was exceptionally beautiful, but there was more that came from within her, this kind of openness. You got the feelings that she was open to everything--dogs, children, men, anything that had any love or smiles attached to it. I was always fascinated by her. And then the thing that started to fascinate me even more was how unlike her I was. There is a common ground between us, however--a need to have a feeling of positive attention coming toward us. In Marilyn's case, as has been often sai d, her mother was not well, mentally, and she didn't know who her father was. You know, I'm not really a Marilyn aficionado. I'm just a person who has been in the business, and you come across information that is interesting to you, so you gather it up. I don't know if I've got all my facts straight, but I do know that when you don't have anybody who can reassure you that you are loved, and that you have a voice and can express yourself, it leaves a hunger and a need that you have to find a way to fill. Marilyn was looking for a father figure, a strong male figure. With Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller and Jack Kennedy and those kinds of people, she was hoping to finally find a man who would provide safety and power. The similarity that Marilyn and I would have had would be that we found our physicality was a source of power. There are lots of different kinds of power. There's money, people with money; they can call shots and they call attention because they have power. There's physical power, people who can th reaten you because they seem to be frightening. And then there is the physical sexual attraction that you can elicit, which is also a tremendous kind of power. If you have that, you can have other kinds of power, because you will be able to sort of use that and parlay it into a whole identity. The fact is: you wouldn't need to go in search of power if you already felt empowered.
After I got into the business I could see what a terrible trap the whole thing could be, and how limiting and frightening it was. Of course, I ended up presenting an image that was totally anti-Marilyn. Look at the poster of me from One Million Years B.C. [1966]: the legs are astride and the arms are poised and very athletic-looking. The image is very formidable. It says, 'This is somebody you're gonna have to deal with. This is a strong woman.' I was a cutoff point between that vulnerable female icon and the more independent female. Based on my experience with my father I saw that men are not necessarily benevolent and lovely all the time, and that they aren't the answer to happiness, and women are always given a secondary role and that they are in a position of submissiveness and servitude a lot. And I just thought, 'No. Uh-uh. I don't think so.'
If Marilyn was 25 now, and had the benefit of the women's movement and of changing perceptions, she couldn't have been Marilyn Monroe. Today you have 13-year-old girls as promiscuous as Marilyn was then, when she was trying to find her way to the top of a very decadent town. So to ask about what Marilyn Monroe might have been today is to ask a question that is not answerable. I don't think she would have been Marilyn the Myth. In 2001 we're at a crossroads, which we saw in the last election, where we really have a divide right down the middle of American society and we don't know how to get across it. If Marilyn hadn't died, and was still alive today, I think the world would have been quite cruel to her as she aged. I don't think she wanted to make a transition into other things. I'm not sure she had the capacity for that. Still, I would have liked to have known her. That would have been nice. We've had similar experiences, and it would have been nice to share some of those experiences with her. I think that kind of camaraderie would've been interesting; even if it was only very episodic, it would've been nice just to exchange notes and talk with her. Marilyn's point of view must've been unique, and I could've learned a lot from her.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1285/is_6_31/ai_75479335

this articel is useful because it provides a link between how marilyn monroe was portrayed by the media, however it is quite positive therefore it can be seen as biased so it may not be as useful.

The 1950s witnessed a decline in quality roles for women. The greatest stars of the 30s and 40s-Barbara Stanwyck, Myrna Loyd, Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis-all fell victim to age discrimination. In their place Hollywood foisted a number of less than stunning actresses that were, nevertheless, embraced by movie audiences. Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner, Kim Novak, Sophia Loren and the others all may have a legitimate claim to sex symbol status, but for the most part even their best performances are rather forgettable. It may come as a surprise to most people, but I actually believe that in retrospect the best actress of the 1950s really was Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn Monroe has never really gotten the credit she deserves as a talented comedienne. Nor has she fully been recognized for her dramatic abilities put on display in such films as Bus Stop and Niagara. Will I try to make the argument that Marilyn Monroe gave the greatest performance of the 1950s? No. But I will make the argument that those great actresses of the 30s and 40s didn't make it through the decade intact, and that the other glamour girls who got Oscars and recognition gave, for the most part, rather mundane and uninteresting performances in most of their films

One cannot say that Marilyn Monroe was ever uninteresting or boring. Even in movies that aren't terribly memorable-The Prince and the Showgirl or River of No Return-you remember Marilyn. And you know what? On second thought, I will make an argument that Marilyn Monroe gave if not the best performance of the 50s then certainly one of the best. Let's face facts, the 1950s was no Hollywood's finest hour. (Though, in comparison to this decade it looks like a nonstop decade of masterpieces.) Hollywood was trying vainly to compete with television by offering deadhead epics and overblown musicals. As a result, the meaty roles that had been written for women in those earlier decades were either watered down into roles suitable for Susan Hayward melodramas or else jettisoned entirely. That is just one reason why Marilyn Monroe's truly tantalizing comedic masterpiece in Some Like it Hot sears itself into one's memory. Filmed in glorious silvery black and white, Marilyn's voluptuous body was never used to greater effect; her obvious womanliness is a counterpoint to the infinitely more realistic flapper female body types of her male co-stars Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. Marilyn's whispery voice swings back and forth between vulnerability and fearlessness to create what may very stand as the single most memorable female movie character of the entire decade.

The Seven Year Itch is another showcase of Monroe's talents. It is beyond easy to see why Tom Ewell engages in such insane behavior and gives over to wild fantasies about his upstairs neighbor. One may well question why a performance in which an actress appear to be doing nothing other than playing herself warrants her elevation to the top spot of all actresses of the decade. Well, it's a toughie, all right. Oddly enough, it was far more difficult for me to pick a single best actress of the 50s than it was for me to pick the best of the 30s and 40s. The reason is that the actresses of the earlier decades who made the final cut all gave solid performances throughout the decades. The 50s is a conundrum. Whereas actresses like Deborah Kerr, Eleanor Parker, Joanne Woodward and Kim Hunter all rose to spectacular heights at various points, overall their canons leave something to be desired. And while Marilyn Monroe only turned in one performance that can stand by the best of the others, she regularly made whatever movie she was in significantly better as a result of her presence.

Marilyn Monroe: Through Your Most Grievous Faultby Ayn Rand (July 22, 2003)
This commentary by Ayn Rand, excerpted from The Voice of Reason, was originally published two weeks after Marilyn Monroe's death on August 5, 1962.The death of Marilyn Monroe shocked people with an impact different from their reaction to the death of any other movie star or public figure. All over the world, people felt a peculiar sense of personal involvement and of protest, like a universal cry of "Oh, no!"They felt that her death had some special significance, almost like a warning which they could not decipher--and they felt a nameless apprehension, the sense that something terribly wrong was involved.They were right to feel it.Marilyn Monroe on the screen was an image of pure, innocent, childlike joy in living. She projected the sense of a person born and reared in some radiant utopia untouched by suffering, unable to conceive of ugliness or evil, facing life with the confidence, the benevolence, and the joyous self-flaunting of a child or a kitten who is happy to display its own attractiveness as the best gift it can offer the world, and who expects to be admired for it, not hurt.In real life, Marilyn Monroe's probable suicide--or worse: a death that might have been an accident, suggesting that, to her, the difference did not matter--was a declaration that we live in a world which made it impossible for her kind of spirit, and for the things she represented, to survive.If there ever was a victim of society, Marilyn Monroe was that victim--of a society that professes dedication to the relief of the suffering, but kills the joyous.None of the objects of the humanitarians' tender solicitude, the juvenile delinquents, could have had so sordid and horrifying a childhood as did Marilyn Monroe.To survive it and to preserve the kind of spirit she projected on the screen--the radiantly benevolent sense of life, which cannot be faked--was an almost inconceivable psychological achievement that required a heroism of the highest order. Whatever scars her past had left were insignificant by comparison.She preserved her vision of life through a nightmare struggle, fighting her way to the top. What broke her was the discovery, at the top, of as sordid an evil as the one she had left behind--worse, perhaps, because incomprehensible. She had expected to reach the sunlight; she found, instead, a limitless swamp of malice.It was a malice of a very special kind. If you want to see her groping struggle to understand it, read the magnificent article in the August 17, 1962, issue of Life magazine. It is not actually an article, it is a verbatim transcript of her own words--and the most tragically revealing document published in many years. It is a cry for help, which came too late to be answered."When you're famous, you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way," she said. "It stirs up envy, fame does. People you run into feel that, well, who is she--who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe? They feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, you know, of any kind of nature--and it won't hurt your feelings--like it's happening to your clothing. . . . I don't understand why people aren't a little more generous with each other. I don't like to say this, but I'm afraid there is a lot of envy in this business.""Envy" is the only name she could find for the monstrous thing she faced, but it was much worse than envy: it was the profound hatred of life, of success and of all human values, felt by a certain kind of mediocrity--the kind who feels pleasure on hearing about a stranger's misfortune. It was hatred of the good for being the good--hatred of ability, of beauty, of honesty, of earnestness, of achievement and, above all, of human joy.Read the Life article to see how it worked and what it did to her:An eager child, who was rebuked for her eagerness--"Sometimes the [foster] families used to worry because I used to laugh so loud and so gay; I guess they felt it was hysterical."A spectacularly successful star, whose employers kept repeating: "Remember you're not a star," in a determined effort, apparently, not to let her discover her own importance.A brilliantly talented actress, who was told by the alleged authorities, by Hollywood, by the press, that she could not act.An actress, dedicated to her art with passionate earnestness--"When I was 5--I think that's when I started wanting to be an actress--I loved to play. I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of grim--but I loved to play house and it was like you could make your own boundaries"--who went through hell to make her own boundaries, to offer people the sunlit universe of her own vision--"It's almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you'll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you're acting"--but who was ridiculed for her desire to play serious parts.A woman, the only one, who was able to project the glowingly innocent sexuality of a being from some planet uncorrupted by guilt--who found herself regarded and ballyhooed as a vulgar symbol of obscenity--and who still had the courage to declare: "We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it's a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift."A happy child who was offering her achievement to the world, with the pride of an authentic greatness and of a kitten depositing a hunting trophy at your feet--who found herself answered by concerted efforts to negate, to degrade, to ridicule, to insult, to destroy her achievement--who was unable to conceive that it was her best she was punished for, not her worst--who could only sense, in helpless terror, that she was facing some unspeakable kind of evil.How long do you think a human being could stand it?That hatred of values has always existed in some people, in any age or culture. But a hundred years ago, they would have been expected to hide it. Today, it is all around us; it is the style and fashion of our century.Where would a sinking spirit find relief from it?The evil of a cultural atmosphere is made by all those who share it. Anyone who has ever felt resentment against the good for being the good and has given voice to it, is the murderer of Marilyn Monroe.

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3247

Marilyn MonroeShe sauntered through life as the most delectable sex symbol of the century and became its most enduring pop confectionBy PAUL RUDNICK Dubious Influences: Century's Villains and Antiheroes Five Captivating Romances: When Love Was the Adventure
Monday, June 14, 1999How much deconstruction can one blond bear? Just about everyone has had a go at Marilyn Monroe. There have been more than 300 biographies, learned essays by Steinem and Kael, countless documentaries, drag queens, tattoos, Warhol silk screens and porcelain collector's dolls. Marilyn has gone from actress to icon to licensed brand name; only Elvis and James Dean have rivaled her in market share. At this point, she seems almost beyond comment, like Coca-Cola or Levi's. How did a woman who died a suicide at 36, after starring in only a handful of movies, become such an epic commodity?



Much has been made of Marilyn's desperate personal history, the litany of abusive foster homes and the predatory Hollywood scum that accompanied her wriggle to stardom. Her heavily flashbulbed marriages included bouts with baseball great Joe DiMaggio and literary champ Arthur Miller, and her off-duty trysts involved Sinatra and the rumor of multiple Kennedys. The unauthorized tell-alls burst with miscarriages, abortions, rest cures and frenzied press conferences announcing her desire to be left alone. Her death has been variously attributed to an accidental overdose, political necessity and a Mob hit. Her yummily lurid bio has provided fodder for everything from a failed Broadway musical to Jackie Susann's trash classics to a fictionalized portrait in Miller's play After the Fall. Marilyn's media-drenched image as a tragic dumb blond has become an American archetype, along with the Marlboro Man and the Harley-straddling wild one. Yet biographical trauma, even when packed with celebrities, cannot account for Marilyn's enduring stature as a goddess and postage stamp. Jacqueline Onassis will be remembered for her timeline, for her participation in events and marriages that mesmerized the planet. Marilyn seems far less factual, more Cinderella or Circe than mortal. There have been other megablonds of varying skills, a pinup parade of Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren and Madonna — but why does Marilyn still seem to have patented the peroxide that they've passed along?

Marilyn may represent some unique alchemy of sex, talent and Technicolor. She is pure movies. I recently watched her as Lorelei Lee in her musical smash, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." The film is an ideal mating of star and role, as Marilyn deliriously embodies author Anita Loos' seminal, shame-free gold digger. Lorelei's honey-voiced, pixilated charm may be best expressed by her line, regarding one of her sugar daddies, "Sometimes Mr. Esmond finds it very difficult to say no to me." Whenever Lorelei appears onscreen, undulating in second-skin, cleavage-proud knitwear or the sheerest orange chiffon, all heads turn, salivate and explode. Who but Marilyn could so effortlessly justify such luscious insanity? She is the absolute triumph of political incorrectness. When she swivels aboard a cruise ship in clinging jersey and a floor-length leopard-skin scarf and matching muff, she handily offends feminists, animal-rights activists and good Christians everywhere, and she wins, because shimmering, jewel-encrusted, heedless movie stardom defeats all common morality. Her wit completes her cosmic victory, particularly in her facial expression of painful, soul-wrenching yearning when gazing upon a diamond tiara, a trinket she initially attempts to wear around her neck. Discovering the item's true function, she burbles, "I always love finding new places to wear diamonds!" Movies can offer a very specific bliss, the gorgeousness of a perfectly lighted fairy tale. Watching Marilyn operate her lips and eyebrows while breathlessly seducing an elderly millionaire is like experiencing the invention of ice cream.

Marilyn wasn't quite an actress, in any repertory manner, and she was reportedly an increasing nightmare to work with, recklessly spoiled and unsure, barely able to complete even the briefest scene between breakdowns. Only in the movies can such impossible behavior, and such peculiar, erratic gifts, create eternal magic — only the camera has the mechanical patience to capture the maddening glory of a celluloid savant like Monroe. At her best, playing warmhearted floozies in Some Like It Hot and Bus Stop, she's like a slightly bruised moonbeam, something fragile and funny and imperiled. I don't think audiences ever particularly identify with Marilyn. They may love her or fear for her, but mostly they simply marvel at her existence, at the delicious unlikeliness of such platinum innocence. She's the bad girl and good girl combined: she's sharp and sexy yet incapable of meanness, a dewy Venus rising from the motel sheets, a hopelessly irresistible home wrecker. Monroe longed to be taken seriously as an artist, but her work in more turgid vehicles, like "The Misfits," was neither original nor very interesting. She needs the tickle of cashmere to enchant for the ages.
Movies have lent the most perishable qualities, such as youth, beauty and comedy, a millennial shelf life. Until the cameras rolled, stars of the past could only be remembered, not experienced. Had she been born earlier, Marilyn might have existed as only a legendary rumor, a Helen of Troy or Tinker Bell. But thanks to Blockbuster, every generation now has immediate access to the evanescent perfection of Marilyn bumping and cooing her way through that chorine's anthem, Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Only movie stars have the chance to live possibly forever, and maybe that's why they're all so crazy. Madonna remade Diamonds in the video of her hit Material Girl, mimicking Marilyn's hot-pink gown and hot-number choreography, and the sly homage seemed fitting: a blond tribute, a legacy of greedy flirtation. Madonna is too marvelously sane ever to become Marilyn. Madonna's detailed appreciation of fleeting style and the history of sensuality is part of her own arsenal, making her a star and a fan in one. Madonna wisely and affectionately honors the brazen spark in Marilyn, the giddy candy-box allure, and not the easy heartbreak.
Marilyn's tabloid appeal is infinite but ultimately beside the point. Whatever destroyed her — be it Hollywood economics or rabid sexism or her own tormented psyche — pales beside the delight she continues to provide. At her peak, Marilyn was very much like Coca-Cola or Levi's — she was something wonderfully and irrepressibly American.
Paul Rudnick, author of The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, writes for stage and screen

http://www.time.com/time/time100/heroes/profile/monroe01.html

Marilyn: The case for 'assisted suicide'
The star was fooled into killing herself, says a newly released FBI file. Did her friends deliberately let her die? Kathy Marks reports
Sunday, 18 March 2007
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Marilyn Monroe may have been tricked into killing herself as part of a plot hatched with the knowledge of the former US attorney general, Robert Kennedy, according to a secret FBI file.
The document, uncovered by an Australian film director, Philippe Mora, suggests Monroe was "induced" to make a suicide attempt, in the belief she would be found in time, and her stomach pumped. Instead, it suggests, she was left to die by staff and friends, including the actor Peter Lawford, who was married to Kennedy's sister, Patricia.
The 36-year-old actress was found naked and face down on her bed on 5 August 1962, with a large quantity of barbiturates in her system. For 45 years conspiracy theorists have claimed that her death was not a simple suicide, with some linking it to alleged affairs with Kennedy and his brother, the then President, John F Kennedy.
According to the FBI report, Robert Kennedy called Lawford from a San Francisco hotel that night "to find out if Marilyn was dead yet". Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, Mr Mora, who is based in Los Angeles, says he found the file among thousands of classified documents recently released under freedom of information laws. Compiled by a "former Special Agent" whose name is deleted, it is headed "Robert F Kennedy".
The FBI received the file on 19 October 1964. It contains a report that claims Monroe was deliberately given the means to fake a suicide attempt. Those in on the conspiracy, as well as Lawford, were her psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, and her secretary and press agent, Pat Newcomb.
The former agent warns he cannot evaluate the authenticity of the information. Even so, saysMora, his file was circulated to five top FBI officers, including Clyde Tolson, right-hand man of bureau chief J Edgar Hoover.
The report that it cites suggests the motive was to silence Monroe, who had threatened to make public a "romance and sex affair" with Robert Kennedy. Monroe had, it says, realised Kennedy was never going to divorce his wife and marry her, as promised. Kennedy had also reneged on a pledge to "take care of everything" after the actress's contract with 20th Century Fox was cancelled. The pair had "unpleasant words" on the phone.
The file - parts of which were deleted before its release - states that Lawford "knew from Marilyn's friends that she often made suicide attempts and that she was inclined to fake a suicide attempt in order to arouse sympathy". He reportedly made "special arrangements" with Greenson, who was treating her for "emotional problems and getting her off the use of barbiturates". On her last visit, Greenson gave Monroe a prescription for 60 tablets of Seconal, used to relieve insomnia and anxiety. The prescription was "unusual in quantity", the report says. Murray left the pills on Monroe's night table.
That day Kennedy left the Beverly Hills Hotel and flew to San Francisco. The report says: "Robert Kennedy made a telephone call to Peter Lawford to find out if Marilyn was dead yet."
Lawford called and spoke to Monroe, "then checked again later to make sure she did not answer". According to the file, Murray then called Greenson to tell him Monroe had taken the pills. "Marilyn expected to have her stomach pumped and get sympathy for her suicide attempt. The psychiatrist left word for Marilyn to take a drive in the fresh air but did not come to see her until after she was known to be dead."
Officially, Monroe was found dead in the early hours by Murray. Within 48 hours, the report says, Newcomb and Lawford had flown to the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport, Massachusetts.
French-born Mora admits he is not sure what to make of the file. He asks: "Is all this the elaborate dirty tricks of Kennedy haters from decades ago, or are we getting closer to the historical truth?"


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/marilyn-the-case-for-assisted-suicide-440741.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4SLSlSmW74