Marilyn Monroe at 100
Monroe, Beaton, Playboy
For the centennial of Marilyn Monroe’s birth today, I wrote a piece for Playboy on Marilyn’s lost Playboy cover. She was infamously Playboy’s first cover girl and “Sweetheart of the Month,” using nude photos taken before she was famous and which, due to the nature of the licensing deal, Monroe did not receive any money for the appearance, nor did she give her approval. It is less well-known that at the time of her death in 1962, Monroe was in talks with Playboy to grace the cover again, this time on her own terms.
Below I am sharing a short essay that I love by Cecil Beaton on Marilyn Monroe, originally published in Harper’s Bazaar, June 1956. He’s such an evocative writer of fashion and celebrity (how could someone be so talented across so many fields???) that re-reading this piece makes me wish I could clear my schedule and spend the day re-reading one of the greatest fashion books of all time, Beaton’s The Glass of Fashion.
Little Girl Alias Femme Fatale
by Cecil Beaton
Miss Marilyn Monroe calls to mind the bouquet of a fireworks display, eliciting from her awed spectators an openmouthed chorus of wondrous ohs and ahs. She is as spectacular as the silvery shower of a Vesuvius fountain; she has rocketed from obscurity to become our postwar sex symbol-the pin-up girl of an age. And whatever press agentry or manufactured illusion may have lit the fuse, it is her own weird genius that has sustained her flight.
Transfigured by the garish marvel of Technicolor and Cinemascope, she walks like an undulating basilisk, scorching everything in her path but the rosemary bushes. Her voice has the sensuality of silk or velvet.
But the real marvel lies in the paradox—somehow we know that this extraordinary performance is pure charade, a little girl’s caricature of Mae West. The puzzling truth is that Miss Monroe is a make-believe siren, unsophisticated as a Rhine maiden, innocent as a sleepwalker. She is an urchin pretending to be grown up, having the time of her life in mother’s moth-eaten finery, tottering about in high-heeled shoes and sipping ginger ale as though it were a champagne cocktail. There is an unworldly, a winsome naiveté about the child’s eyes that, quick as a flash, will screw up into a pair of sexy, smoldering slits and give you a synthetic “come-hither” look. Just as obligingly, the delicate, flexible mouth, half-parted in springtime ecstasy, will burst into a generous grimace, displaying flawless seed-pearl teeth while the surrounding lips quiver nervously and seem almost shocking in their mobile suggestiveness.
Behind this brilliant, pseudo-fatal façade is the real Marilyn Monroe. She might be the latter-day incarnation of a Greuze portrait, the quintessence of partridge-plump prettiness with full, high breasts, eighteenth-century rump and a delicately modeled face eyes felicitously wide apart, chin appealingly small, putty-like nose created expressly for wrinkling up with delight, or for photography (though in profile the urchin is apt to gain the ascendancy).
Passing across these enviable features, like blips on a radar screen, is an incredible display of inspired, narcissistic moods. With the possible exception of a Scotch landscape, there has seldom been such an everchanging subject for the photographer. He may miss recording one mood, but a dozen others will assault him with machine-gun recompense.
In her presence, you are startled, then disarmed, by her lack of inhibition. What might at first seem like exhibitionism is yet counterbalanced by a wistful incertitude beneath the surface. If this star is an abandoned sprite, she touchingly looks to her audience for approval. She is strikingly like an overexcited child asked downstairs after tea. The initial shyness over, excitement has now gotten the better of her. She romps, she squeals with delight, she leaps onto the sofa. She puts a flower stem in her mouth, puffing on a daisy as though it were a cigarette. It is an artless, impromptu, high-spirited, infectiously gay performance. It may end in tears.
Equally impromptu is her general appearance. This canary blond nymph has been so sufficiently endowed by nature as to pay no attention to the way she looks. Her hair, her nails, her make-up, have a makeshift, spontaneous attractiveness. It is all very contemporary: Marilyn Monroe conjures up two straws in a single soda, juke boxes, sheer nylons and drive-in movies for necking (does she not project a hypnotized nymphomania?).
This, then, is the wonder of the age—a dreaming somnambule, a composite of Alice in Wonderland, Trilby and a Minsky artist. Perhaps she was born the postwar day we had need of her. Certainly she has no knowledge of the past. Like Giraudoux’ Ondine, she is only fifteen years old; and she will never die.
I enjoyed your story for PLAYBOY! Thanks for sharing this Beaton essay 💖