Marilyn monroe

Marilyn Monroe, poetic muse

The year 1959 was a particularly productive but especially depressing year for Sylvia Plath. She toured the length of America, attended a series of stimulating literary seminars and wrote some of her most beloved verse. While outwardly active and energetic, her diary reveals she was struggling all the time to sustain her few fleeting fits of happiness. One entry in October describes a vivid dream she had, in which Marilyn Monroe appeared as a kind of fairy godmother. Monroe gave Plath a manicure and promised her a “new, flowering life,” before wishing her well and inviting the troubled poet over for Christmas. The image of Monroe clearly consoled her. Plath was hardly the only poet to be mesmerized by Monroe’s outward magnificence and fascinated by her perturbing private tragedies.

How Norman Mailer changed the face of biography

Many labels leap to mind in association with the prolific and controversial Norman Mailer, who died in 2007, but “biographer” is not typically one of them. He was not considered a serious practitioner of the genre in the same sense as Edmund Morris, Ron Chernow or his friend Doris Kearns Goodwin. And yet, as his own official biographer J. Michael Lennon asserts to me, “Mailer became a major biographer in the last half of his career.” Thirty years ago, two intriguing books by Mailer appeared just a few months apart: Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery and Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man.

Mailer

The Some Like It Hot revival is cream-puff theater

The new Some Like It Hot on Broadway has bass player Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee), disguised among Big Sue’s Society Syncopators as “Daphne” to hide from the Chicago mob, decide to embrace the drag lifestyle and elope with his elderly suitor Osgood (Kevin Del Aguila) by the show’s end. (The 1959 film closes with Jerry straining to extract himself from Osgood’s clutches.) Many theatergoers will not expect this update, setting up a bit of dramatic irony too delicious to be unintentional. What’s a drag show, after all, without a few surprises? To my knowledge, this irony has gone entirely uncapitalized by headline-writers across the nation. Some Like a Hot Dog! Speakeasy, Don’t Tell! Billy, but Wilder! Jack’s Lemon!

some like it hot

The grand return of Pamela Anderson

The recent Golden Globe awards saw the Hulu miniseries Pam & Tommy, a fictionalized account of the theft of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s notorious sex tape, lose out to The White Lotus. It wasn’t much of a surprise. Whether or not you thought the second series of The White Lotus was a worthy successor to the first, it was still much-discussed water-cooler television in a way that Pam & Tommy simply wasn’t. Yet perhaps there was another consideration at play. 2023 marks the grand return of Pamela Anderson — if, of course, she ever went away. She refused to cooperate with the production of the miniseries, and it’s now clear she didn’t want it to interfere with her own ambitions.

Great! Another podcast about feminism 

Politics, feminism, sex, TikTok. These four topics will form the heart of Emily Ratajkowski’s new podcast High Low with Emrata. Doubtless Cockburn speaks for everyone when he says: praise the gods, a podcast about feminism is just what the market is missing. The new Sony-produced series will consist of two episodes per week. One will see the model and swimwear entrepreneur sit down for intimate conversations with special guests. Perhaps she'll diverge from the Meghan Markle playbook and actually let her guests speak. The second will have Ratajkowski’s own commentary on current events. Cockburn is sure you’re just as excited as him to hear what the model has to say about the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and ballot harvesting.

emily ratajkowski

Blonde and Hollywood’s immortal sucking machines

The most interesting part of the new Netflix Marilyn Monroe pic Blonde, for me, is the representation of a very specific kind of Hollywood rot. We do not at first appreciate very much about the two men with whom a young Marilyn Monroe, played by Ana de Armas, begins a romantic affair. We know they are two faces in a Hollywood acting class. We know they are bookends of a sort — blandly handsome, interchangeable, good casting on the part of writer/director Andrew Dominik, who in other ways delivers a project that, in the words of a friend, “looks like a very expensive student film.

blonde

Chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer’s fall from grace

“Paradoxes arise within an individual in proportion to their growing status or fame,” the author Stewart Stafford reminds us. Whether it’s the sexual peccadilloes of Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein, Lance Armstrong’s relaxed approach to his diet, or the apparent reluctance of certain well-known television performers to overdo it when it comes to wearing trousers in the green room, for many of our celebrities it seems that personal license is the rule and sustained self-restraint the exception.

bobby fischer

The unsolved mystery of Marilyn Monroe

When Kim Kardashian wore Marilyn Monroe’s dress to the Met Ball back in May, the world was aghast. Many claimed the dress was damaged (something the owners deny), and the dress’s original designer, Bob Mackie, told the world it was a “big mistake," saying, “Nobody else should be seen in that dress.” Some of the concerns came from the fact that Kim Kardashian had had to lose a significant amount of weight to fit the blonde bombshell’s proportions — the dress was so tight on Monroe that she'd had to be sewn into it — and that it set a dangerous precedent for the preservation of historical costumes.