Embody the Spirit of Marilyn Monroe

Scott Holleran invites you to celebrate Marilyn’s centenary

“Above all, I think that the willingness and the courage to keep on trying develops best if there is someone we love close by who can lend us some of the strength we do not yet have within ourselves.” —Fred Rogers

What’s the primary lesson of Marilyn Monroe?

Marilyn Monroe was like a bright, shining light from which you can draw wisdom, strength and inspiration. For many, perhaps most, Marilyn was too bright. If you’re of her caliber—if you’ve been told your whole life that you’re too much, too intense, too serious or, in today’s parlance, you’re hypersensitive, “on the spectrum,” or “neurodivergent” or merit any variety of terms denoting some degree of sensitivity as against displaying today’s blank grayness—you probably get the gleam of Marilyn’s aura, light and appeal. You know Marilyn’s legacy’s not lurid or indiscriminate sex.

Marilyn Monroe made herself with love; her legacy’s gilded in sex, which, properly integrated, also expresses love. In this sense, Marilyn is the quintessential American self-made woman; a heroine who completely made herself. As an artist, thinker and reader, she made herself wholly over in the deepest, highest and most refined sense. Even her detractors begrudgingly tend to admit this. Who she made herself into is one of the most beautiful women in the world.

The story of Marilyn Monroe’s death integrates the story of her life. Despite the tragedy of her despair and flaws, what makes Marilyn’s 1962 death desperate and heartbreaking also crystallizes everything we know in the so-called mindfulness movement as well as in cognitive behavioral therapy and longevity lessons and scads of self-improvement advice—including in the Seventies’ self-esteem movement or by any jargon (i.e., self-help, personal growth, self-care).

Marilyn valued herself. She did her best, yet never belonged. She was smeared and vilified. People blamed (and still blame) the victim—especially the vulnerable and successful one who refuses to suppress vulnerability and be the victim—and Marilyn was the victim. She was a lost, radiant soul who ought to have been saved, as Ayn Rand eloquently wrote in her Los Angeles Times column days after Marilyn’s death. She’s particularly relevant now, even as she’s explicitly valued by defenders of loving the good for being the good, from Miss Rand to Elton John.

The lesson of her life and death is deeply felt a hundred years after her birth. It’s a simple point in a wider wisdom that’s profoundly burrowed in daily life. Marilyn Monroe sought only to love and be loved by those who were worthy of her, including her admiration and highest reverence for life. She started, to her credit, with herself and valiantly strived, like many persons of ability, despite early damage—i.e., trauma—and in the end she wasn’t able to make her own life go. As Miss Rand wrote:

In real life, Marilyn Monroe’s probable suicide — or worse: a death that might have been an accident, suggesting that, to her, the difference did not matter — was a declaration that we live in a world which made it impossible for her kind of spirit, and for the things she represented, to survive.

How do you survive? To the extent it feels sometimes like you can’t, what stops or obstructs you? Like Marilyn Monroe in her prime, you can reject the contempt of egalitarians, i.e., feminists, dilettantes and leftists, who detest and revile her; the mindless mass who “murdered” her—as Ayn Rand bitingly and brilliantly wrote. You can choose to watch Marilyn move, sing, dance, act, laugh, pause to accentuate, talk to and enlighten herself in love, insatiable curiosity and passion for life. You can choose to go with what’s pure and good. You can make appreciating Marilyn like a pact.

You can study, understand and celebrate Marilyn on a first-name basis—because, when you invoke someone you love, the essence or spirit of the loved one doesn’t die. You can remake yourself, too. You can revitalize with your own radiance.

Of course Marilyn was fallible. Valuable lessons of her life can be learned. To celebrate her is to know that, while it may have been—and still may be—too soon for Marilyn Monroe, like her character in Bus Stop, now can be your time to shine, step up and choose to begin again despite whatever’s dimming you down. You can practice, seek and keep what’s good, including the company of friends who love the good being the good. To this noble goal, as Marilyn says in one of her most iconic movie roles: Bottoms up.

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