MARILYN FOREVER BLONDE

by Madeleine Peck Wagner
Marilyn. Monroe. Just typing that name seems a ritual act designed to conjure snippets of huge eyelashes, shimmering dresses, and a flawless coiffure. Of a time when three martini lunches were de rigueur, and Hollywood wasn’t just a machine, it was the machine. As a culture, our fascination with Marilyn is enduring…whether taking the form of a lip-syncing drag queen or pop princesses trying to evoke a similar sympathy/passion response.
PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Policy at Brandeis University and a gender studies scholar, Ashley Rondini comments on Marilyn saying, “In the pop cultural imagination, Marilyn Monroe symbolizes the enduring, paradoxical ideal of overt sensuality and projected innocence with which women have had to contend for decades. Speaking in a ‘baby voice,’ feigning obliviousness to the hyperbolic sexual allure that she exudes, and smiling knowingly as she holds down just enough of her upswept skirt to ‘leave something to the imagination,’ she flirtatiously embodies the role of ‘object’ to the male gaze.”
However, like the best icons, Marilyn was and is by no means a singularly explainable phenomenon. Rondini continues, “at the same time, for feminists who seek to promote the celebration of women’s bodies in their ‘natural’ curvy form, her dress size and body measurements are oft-cited counter-arguments to the ultra-thin hegemonic standards with which most of our current icons of feminine beauty uniformly comply.”
It’s a duality that isn’t just present in her movies and image, it is, according to actor Sunny Thompson who portrays her in the show, Marilyn Forever Blonde, one that she carried with her, her entire post-Norma Jean career. “She actively cultivated a persona…she was very smart and in her mind, she was very much two people: Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jean. These two people were very separate and that has been confirmed to me by many people who knew her,” says the actress who has exhaustively researched Monroe, the person.
The premise of Marilyn Forever is simple, but genius: it is a re-imagining of her final photo shoot with photographer Bert Stern. In it, she talks to the photographer (audience) about her life and career, but in her own words. Sunny’s husband, producer Greg Thompson conceived the play many years ago, but it was a long road to convincing his wife that she should play the title role. “People used to tell me that I looked like Marilyn, but I really never paid much attention to it. Finally though, Greg got me to read some of the lines and we haven’t really looked back,” she says.
Playing Marilyn requires more than just a passing resemblance to the blonde bombshell. “…she was so subtle with her makeup, and her entire image.” She would take time all the time she needed to perfectly apply what she called her ‘colors,’” notes Thompson. In fact, the process of transformation from Sunny to Marilyn is an important part of Thompson’s performance preparation, and she says it routinely takes well over an hour for her to get it just right. “We enlisted the help of Jimmy James, a famous Marilyn impersonator from the ’80s, and he came and helped me really get her look down,” says Thompson of the lengths the production has gone to.
Marilyn Forever is a one-woman show. In it Marilyn is 36, more famous than anyone else in the world (bigger than Madonna), and wanting to transition from the fluffy films of her 20s to stiffer, more serious stuff. She’s unhappy, drinking too much and popping too many pills. So she tells her story. “I think people come to the play because they want to spend an hour or so with Marilyn,” reflects Thompson. And she has the support from people who knew and remember Marilyn saying so too.
Mr. Blackwell (of the eponymous best and worst-dressed list), told her he cried while watching it, and that it was “a play to fight for.” While Thompson herself says, “It’s an actress’s dream—she was a comedienne, a tortured soul, a girl one moment and a woman the next.”
Directed by Stephanie Shine, the artistic director of the Seattle Shakespeare Company, the play has won multiple awards and garnered accolades in the press. Paul Vale, writing for online publication The Stage wrote: Thompson’s Monroe is eerily accurate – a homage to the late actress indeed and a remarkably brave performance that touches the heart. Even when she removes the make-up to reveal Norma Jean beneath, Thompson still has the presence to make us believe she is Monroe.”
The show itself looks fascinating not because the facts of Marilyn’s life are unknown, but because Marilyn is so hard to know. Her flawless beauty and mysteriously tragic death only serve to deepen the mystery of her unhappiness. Of the pills that took Marilyn’s life, Thompson comments, “I think it was just an accident because she had overdosed before. This time she took two incompatible sleeping pills.” However, Thompson does offer a caveat. “With all the research I’ve done, it sorta points to the Kennedys. She had her affair with JFK all written down, and as she’s dead on the bed, the FBI is going through her papers and destroying things…”
Marilyn’s life had it all: glamor, fame, money, tragedy, and mystery. But perhaps Clark Gable sums our fascination with her up best when he said “Nobody had that kind of charisma, she made a man glad to be a man.”
Marilyn Forever Blonde is presented in conjunction with MOCA Jacksonville’s winter art exhibit: “Life as Legend: Marilyn Monroe,” a collection of 286 objects that chronicles her life and influence. The exhibit includes works by Andy Warhol, Christo, Douglas Kirkland, Robert Indiana, Mel Ramos, Richard Avedon, Bert Stern, Henri Cartier-Bresson and among others. The exhibit runs through April 4, and the performance runs every weekend from February 17 through March 7.