Marilyn Monroe, the 'Magnificent Prey''s century of sensual and melancholic stardom

In Ron Howard's beautiful film on Richard Avedon, screened out of competition at the last Cannes Film Festival, there is a part dedicated to Marilyn Monroe. In the documentary, named after the photographer to whom it is dedicated, the story is told of how Avedon had pampered and entertained Marilyn for an entire day without being able to remove her mask, when he usually only needed four or five shots to capture the subject 'naked'. Thus, the man who had changed the world of fashion with unusual scenarios (the famous photo of the model among elephants) and fought for civil rights (the partnership with the black manequin, Luna, and the march for the rights of African-Americans with James Baldwin in the 1960s), had to wait the whole day. Eventually, the exhausted actress showed her sad face. Avedon caught her in a shot that made her immortal, as she stared slantingly with her eyes lost, her mouth waiting above the bodice of glittering showbiz sequins.

Marilyn was impregnable in life and remains so now, a hundred years after her birth. Not even the film Blonde (2022), directed by Andrew Dominik and based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates, managed to capture her. The albeit talented Ana de Armas did not enter the mysterious intimacy of the world's most famous pin-up, which mixed neuroses, ghosts, sensuality and something secret even from herself. This was her genius, which attracted the desire of many to get into her skin: first, Andy Warhol in '57, and then, among the most famous, Madonna and Dafoe.

Norma Jeane Mortenson Baker was born in Los Angeles on 1 June 1926 and died there on 4 August 1962. She did not know her father and her childhood was characterised by mental instability and beatings by her mother Gladys, an editor at Columbia and Rko, whom she met only a few years after her birth. For the first few years she was placed in the care of a very religious couple from Hawthorne, a town south-west of Los Angeles. When Gladis was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, Norma Jeane was forced to move from one foster home to another and eventually always sent back to the orphanage. These experiences branded on her a chronic emotional instability, which did not diminish in her ill-fated marriages to former baseball champion Joe di Maggio, too jealous and macho to allow her a peaceful development of her acting career, and Arthur Miller, a committed playwright, who crushed her with his ego. Then the hidden and guilty relationships with Charlie Chaplin's two sons, Charles Chaplin Jr. and Sydney Chaplin, and the Kennedys, JFK and Robert. Along with other adventures, or alleged adventures, for which she is hounded by the paparazzi and the gossip papers.

Norma Jeane began working as a model before signing her first film contract in 1946. She appeared in magazines as a squat, smiling teenager, flipping through magazines with a mixture of naivety and an awareness of the photogenic radiance emanating from corsets and bikinis. Norma Jeane would have liked to be a mannequin, but she didn't have the measurements or, more importantly, the stature. Growing up, her physique led her rather towards the shapely creature that has remained etched in our imagination. Her very special insecure and mischievous smile, which made her the 'Magnificent Prey' of male desire, opened the door to the cinema, where her mother had worked hard behind the scenes.

With effort and rigour she climbed the stairs of Hollywood success, first in tiny parts and then as a leading lady. What made her make the leap was a change of hair colour. From brown to platinum blonde (blonde), Marilyn Monroe was born. The aesthetic change was not enough for her, she studied acting and singing, but the studios were not interested in this.