Volume 47, Number 10 · June 15, 2000
Her Story
By Luc Sante
Blonde
by Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco/HarperCollins, 738 pp., $27.50
Was there such a person as Marilyn Monroe? The more her image is replicated the more invented it seems; the more her name is employed the more it sounds like the trade name it in fact was. Her face, once a particular example, however shining and glorious, of movie star beauty, is now its unattainable ideal, the template from which all future beauty will descend and which all prior beauty prophesied. The icon in the billowing white dress may historically derive from a scene in The Seven-Year Itch, but it might just as well have been magically imprinted on the lining of a peasant's cloak. This air of unreality, or super-reality, doesn't seem restricted to her posthumous career. Her image detaches itself from her films, estimable and lousy alike, and floats free of them. The paradox is that she was as gifted an actor as anyone who ever employed the Method, inhabiting and developing each role well beyond the often crude sketches she was given to work with, and yet each role is partly or completely eclipsed by the iconic image of Marilyn, glowing in the dark.
Review, 4421 words
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