Picture Marilyn at Ninety-Five
Born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926, Marilyn Monroe, had she lived, would have turned ninety-five this month. Who wants to imagine Marilyn Monroe at ninety-five? I do! I want to imagine her pointing an unmanicured finger at the camera, her uneven skin barely holding to her skeleton, her face a little droopy in a way that makes me love her even more. She’d spout one of her many truths, targets of inordinate internet searches.
“If I’d observed all the rules, I’d never have got anywhere,” she’d say and then smile, her teeth a little yellow, her breath a little stale.
She’d be wearing a denim gardening shirt, a man’s large, cinched with a belt made from a rainbow rope of braided bandannas, her legs wild and free underneath, veins visible, purple and proud. She’d have a pink gerber daisy pushed behind her right ear, dusting its rouge on the curve of her papery cheek. Lips? Wickedly colorless and groovy.
In the afternoon, the queen would hold court at her front fence with whoever would hear her, mostly the school girls whose great-grandmothers gave them a map to her condo and the secret code to get through the front gate. Mostly, the curious crowd would bring questions like the ones that a teacher might suggest for interviewing the elderly. How much did bread cost when you were a girl? Did you have a dog? What do you remember about the war?
Which war? She would ask, having lived through a number, national and personal. No, they would not ask what it was like to have an affair with a president or what it meant to be a pin-up girl. The smartest ones might ask if she had words of wisdom to impart, their notepads ready. At that, she would pull them closer. She might take the daisy from her ear and hold it toward them like a wand.
“Young women,” she might say, “what you need to know is this . . . . ‘A wise girl knows her limits, a smart girl knows that she has none.’ ”
The smart girls would grin at both claims, truths they had already suspected.
I like to think that we all have a little Norma Jean in us, part star shine, part fiesta, part mess. I think I’ll take a fresh look at Some Like It Hot to celebrate Pride and to celebrate her. Something tells me seeing a couple white guys from the 1950s in drag will do my heart good. But mostly, there’s Marilyn.
Forever young.
(Bolded words attributed to Marilyn Monroe)
