September 13, 2007
Marilynity


cydytame181.jpgI’m not sure if this is my idea, or if I’ve stolen it from someone and my memory does not permit me to recall whom, but here goes: Marilyn Monroe, the name itself is an open-mouthed confectionary kiss.

“Em”: the lips pooch outwards, opening. “Air”: the mouth opens wider, enveloping. “Ih”: the tongue begins to reach forward. “Ell”: it darts out, searching another. “Ihn”: the mouth closes, but only for a slim second because “Moh” opens it again; “Ehn” closes the mouth (but not the lips, never the lips) momentarily, for it fulsomely, fetchingly pouts with “Roe,” and the name leaves us open-lipped and hoping for more.

Each syllable, each phoneme, is a will to seduction. A name that, unlike her quotidian Norma Jean Baker, compels the speaker and the auditor both to submit to the flicker in the naughty bits. And it was she, this Marilyn Monroe, who captivated adolescent me.

Sex, I understood early, was power. More importantly, I understood it was my power. But like a young Jedi, I had the Force, yet I didn’t know what to do with it. It scared me as much as it thrilled me. I could see the quake and tremble of others while in areole of my tongue-tripping Lolitaness (though I’ve never been a nymphette-my limbs have never been thin and doe-like, my hands have never held the transcendent ephemerality of the nymphette-I’ve always been fairly stolidly earthbound). I could see how it made others uncomfortable, and disquiet is, if not disempowerment exactly, an unbalancing and an opportunity to take the advantage just lying in wait.

I learned this equation of power and sex from my single mother who, when I was four, hit the sexual revolution running. My mom was a stone-cold hottie. She taught high school with sleek blonde hair, a deep tan, and a micro-mini. She posed nude for photographs. She dated with a wild abandon. She recognized that as much as her power was her intelligence, it was also her sex, and she enjoyed it as much, as loudly and as often as she could.

Which was often. And loudly. And much, I would hazard to guess.

My mother, well into her thirties, modeled for a local department store, and I would see her all made up in technicolors and dolled up in see-through plastic disco jeans (which they paired with tights that had that weird panty built in. Even at fourteen, I recognized that this was an unholy union.) I saw how she comported herself around my father and how she did around the men who were not my father.

I heard the comments that they made about her-man and woman both-and I saw that she often gained the upper hand by this flamboyant wielding of sex.

So I appropriated it for myself, but I still didn’t know what to do with it. I remember being sixteen, living for the summer in Boston, working for this awful rich single mother as an au pair, and having this fiftyish man who also lived in the apartment complex approach me over and over making vague references to what he would do to me if he were alone.

I giggled, in response. I didn’t know what to do, how I had done what I had done, nor how to deal with it now that I had done it.

I giggled too when, two summers later, I was working as a waitress in a pizza parlor and my boss would trap me against the counter with his hairy arms and tell me how he’d like to have me in a hot tub.

I giggled too when, several years later, another manager in a restaurant sidled up to me and whispered in my ear that he’d like to rub my nipples until they were cherry red.

In Marilyn I thought I found a Yoda for my force. I read books and books about her. I studied photos and I watched the movies. I became an armchair Marilyn scholar. Did you know her first filmic moment, a walk-on in Scudda-Hoo, Scudda-Hay, ended up on the cutting room floor? I do. Did you know that she had six toes on her left foot? She did.

I identified with this woman who died before I was born because she looked as if she was not born into this greatness, but that it had been thrust upon, or perhaps within, her, and as much as the producers always somehow looked like frightened rabbits, she herself both enjoyed and feared their fear. Just like I did.

Like so many troubled teen girls, I found in Marilyn a part of myself. In her I found the same profound ambivalence to her sexuality, the recognition that it was a silken cage, but a cage nonetheless, the fear that it was all that she was, and the vulnerability of trying to figure it all out.

Marilyn, like me, had heft. She was no small girl, my Marilyn. She had the big curves, the generous and good-natured ass. She had soft arms and sometimes a tiny round belly. She was not, like the icons of the seventies, or like my mother, all acute angles and flat planes. Marilyn had a body I could recognize, and as much as I read about her and saw my self, I looked at her and saw my body. I wanted it because to want it was to want myself; and to see how others wanted her was reassurance once removed for my fractured and needy ego.

Marilyn, I read, reclined in bed, wrapped two strands of spaghetti under her breasts, and said, “This is what I think of bras,” so I stopped wearing them. Marilyn, I read, stood on a cinematic subway grate to have her seven-year itch skirt blow up and, to Joe DiMaggio’s horror, reveal her naked nethers. I stopped wearing panties too.

Like Marilyn, I picked men who disapproved of me in some way or another. Like Marilyn, I felt chastisement was love. Like Marilyn, I longed for someone to see the wide-eyed fear and the creeping horrorsloth under my creamy surface and to be loved for that as much as my slitty-eyed promise of concupiscent excess.

Like Marilyn, I recognized the ticking bomb of my own depression and how it would, inevitably, at the rate I was going, take me down and leave me, like her, white sheet covered in only somewhat less questionable circumstances.

Unlike Marilyn, that has not/will not be my fate.

I have, over the years, watched as other women have tried tottering in Marilyn’s heels. I gazed cruel kitty-eyed at the Marilyn phase of Madonna, when a pre-yoga plush Madonna dated John-John and met Jackie, and wondered how that might have been. I noted Anna Nicole Smith’s Marylin moments, her bleach-blonde hair and her blank-eyed bovinity that showed that she didn’t quite get it.

I have, at some point over the intervening years of my adulthood, left this Marilynolatry behind. I had, at some point, ceased my incessant apotheosizing of this icon to personal Jesushood. I have, at some point in this growing up, come to realize that for all its come-hither deliciousness, this sexuality I have wrapped myself in is a delicate form of armor, strong, though, and one that ironically repels with the force of its promise of intimacy.

I still like her, this Marilyn, who for a hundred hundred reasons will endure like Aphrodite in our collective conscious. For one thing, Some Like it Hot is a near-perfect movie. I’ve moved on in my maturity, however, to look to women less tragic in their world view, less buffeted about like seaweed in a tide pool, and more able to articulate their place in the world on their own terms.

But my Marilynity remains, somehow; the residue resides in my fear and my armor and my continuing desire to figure it all out.


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