Marilyn Monroe

Date

1926–1962

Description

City of birth: Los Angeles
Country of birth: United States
Field of activity: Culture — film, performance

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Quotes

‘The death of Marilyn Monroe shocked people with an impact different from their reaction to the death of any other movie star or public figure. All over the world, people felt a peculiar sense of personal involvement and of protest, like a universal cry of “Oh, no!” They felt that her death had some special significance, almost like a warning which they could not decipher — and they felt a nameless apprehension, the sense that something terribly wrong was involved. They were right to feel it. Marilyn Monroe on the screen was an image of pure, innocent, child-like joy in living. She projected the sense of a person born and reared in some radiant utopia untouched by suffering, unable to conceive of ugliness or evil, facing life with the confidence, the benevolence, and the joyous self-flaunting of a child or a kitten who is happy to display its own attractiveness as the best gift it can offer the world, and who expects to be admired for it, not hurt. … If ever here was a victim of society, Marilyn Monroe was that victim — of a society that professes dedication to the relief of suffering but kills the joyous. None of the objects of the humanitarians’ tender solitude, the juvenile delinquents, could have had so sordid and horrifying a childhood as did Marilyn Monroe. To survive it and to preserve the kind of spirit she projected on the screen — the radiantly benevolent sense of life, which cannot be faked — was an almost inconceivable psychological achievement that required heroism of the highest order. Whatever scars her past had left were insignificant by comparison. She preserved her vision of life through a nightmare struggle, fighting her way to the top. What broke her was the discovery, at the top, of as sordid and evil as the one she had left behind — worse, perhaps, because incomprehensible. She had expected to reach the sunlight, she found, instead, a limitless swamp of malice. … “Envy” is the only names she could find for the monstrous thing she faced, bit it was much worse than envy: it was profound hatred of life, of success and of all human values.’

Author

Ayn Rand

Speaker

Ayn Rand

Title of the publication

‘Ayn Rand Column’

Other contributors

n/a

Publisher (or journal name with vol. and number)

Los Angeles Times

City of publication

Los Angeles

Country of publication (modern nation-state equivalent)

United States of America

Publication date

19 August 1962

Other location

https://courses.aynrand.org/works/through-your-most-grievous-fault/

Original language

English

Genre

Newspaper article

Context

In 1962 Ayn Rand accepted an invitation to write a weekly column for the Los Angeles Times. The column became enormously popular, covering a wide variety of topics: from the welfare state to freedom of speech to foreign policy to the death of Marilyn Monroe published on 19 August 1962, two weeks after Monroe’s death on 5 August. The column was later included in Rand’s books The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (1989) and The Ayn Rand Column (1991 and 1998).

‘When you’re famous, you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way, it stirs up envy, fame does. People you run into feel that, well, who is she — who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe? They feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, you know, of any kind of nature — and it won’t hurt your feelings — like it’s happening to your clothing ... I don’t understand why people aren’t a little more generous with each other. I don’t like to say this, but I’m afraid there is a lot of envy is this business.’

Author

Marilyn Monroe

Speaker

Marilyn Monroe

Title of the publication

‘A Last Long Talk with a Lonely Girl’

Other contributors

Richard Meryman, Interviewer/Associate Editor

Publisher (or journal name with vol. and number)

Life Magazine

City of publication

New York

Country of publication (modern nation-state equivalent)

United States of America

Publication date

17 August 1962

Location [pp. or web]

https://www.life.com/people/marilyn-monroe-life-magazine-covers-photos/

Other location

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/sep/14/greatinterviews; http://www.marilynmonroe.ca/camera/mags/life62.htm

Original language

English

Genre

Interview

Context

A few weeks before her death, Marilyn Monroe, talked at length to Life Magazine Associate Editor Richard Merryman about the effects of fame on her life.

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