But let us cut to the Greek nature of the tragedy as they would say in that vulgar citadel, Hollywood. Her first 'patron' told her she reminded him of a Broadway star called Marilyn Miller: she obediently assumed the Christian name and added the surname ten years later.
As a child she had fantasised that Clark Gable was her real father, and hung his picture alongside Abraham Lincoln’s on her wall. When she got to act with him, her perverse behaviour helped bring on his fatal heart attack: she herself speculated that this might have been her revenge on the father who never declared himself.
For her tuition as an actress Marilyn depended utterly on two women whom she first exalted then pitilessly destroyed. A singing coach who gave her honest devotion was so hounded by the jealous DiMaggio that he tried to end things with a draught of cleaning fluid. Soon after, in the nicest possible way, she dumped him; he is still an invalid today
Now to the husbands, Arthur Miller survived the long suicide of Marilyn Monroe, but his muse fell silent. Joe DiMaggio, his baseball-star predecessor, loved her faithfully despite the years of public insult from her, and today still grinds his teeth in silence, no interviews, no comment.
And onto the 'close admirers': silence of a different sort descended on Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department when journalists started probing after her death: Marilyn had been a phone call away from killing Bobby’s career, and possibly brother Jack’s as well.
Marilyn, driven by her animal recoil from any form of suffering her exquisite grace on screen derived from her instinctive projection of her real self. As with her fellow-narcissist Greta Garbo, the pull which Marilyn exerts for Eighties audiences has to do with a quality which throve in unreflective innocence and which is in these post-feminist days extinct, Noraml Mailer sensibly wary of Marilyn’s creative memory and of her gossip-columnist friends, distinguished betwee facts and factoids, those things which are not so much lies as satisfying embellishments of the truth.
Fact: Marilyn reading Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man while the cast of Some like it hot wait her pleasure, and shouting ‘Go fuck yourself’ at the nervous assistant who asks if she is ready to work.
Factoid: asked how she feels about getting married to DiMaggio, Marilyn replies: ‘I’ve sucked my last cock.’
Marilyn’s last days in the cramped, uncomfortable house she finally chose for herself shows the deprived and angry child living on in parallel with the superstar, and eventually asserting its grim supremacy. There was the importance to her of her five-year-old of her dog Tippy, and the shattering blow to her confidence when a neighbour shot him – Mailer thinks that marked the start of her stammer In her transformation from slut to star, she was torn apart by the conflict between her contempt for ordinariness and her desperate desire to be ordinary. The outrageous creature who went about naked under her mink coat ached to be a proper wife and mother. The man who re-beautified her after autopsy was her regular make-up artist, and in his pocket was a gold-plated money-clip she had given him years before, with the inscription: ‘To Whitey. While I’m still warm. Marilyn.
So why the Warhol like fascination with Marilyn? As Michael Church observes the fascination of Marilyn's story lies in the somnambulistic sureness with which not only she but everyone around her played their parts, fusing life and art.
So we are all a littly guilty of escapism, is that not so?
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