Saturday Showdown; Marilyn vs Audrey - Round 1: Marilyn!

Oh Norma Jean!

It almost sounds like a fairy tale; the daughter of an unwed mother spends childhood being sent all over the country to various, mostly unhappy, foster homes, gets married at an early age, and that's unhappy too, and then, after being both poor and unhappy for most of her life, she becomes one of the most successful actresses in Hollywood, a sex symbol (although she didn't really enjoy that bit, and I quote 'a sex symbol is a thing. And I just hate to be a thing') and an icon. It's not a fairy tale, though, and the ending is far more tragic that Cinderella's, but all the same - Marylin Monroe is just as iconic as a Disney Princess. Perhaps more.

Her films- Some Like It Hot, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How To Marry A Millionaire to name a few- have come to not only showcase but define an era of Hollywood's history that seems impossible now. An era where romance and glamour ruled over all, where the paps only saw what you wanted them to see, where affairs remained secret and were never splashed over the front page of a newspaper (yes, K-Stew, I'm looking at you) unless the adulterers wanted it to be, and where the Queen of Hollywood was a woman who was once known as Norma (a name I, by the way, think should totes come back in to fashion). Her characters and films are iconic because she was iconic, and from the white dress-over-the-subway-grate scene in The Seven Year Itch to that last line of Some Like It Hot, they have entrenched themselves so deeply into pop culture that even Madonna, an icon herself, borrowed her look and stuck it on an album cover.

And it's not just her films that have made her iconic (although they did help. Obvs.), her turbulent and whirlwind romances in the public eye, that were so far removed from her rumoured-to-be-forced first marriage all those years ago, seemed to reiterate the romances of her films. Her elopment with baseball star Joe DiMaggio, for example, sounds like a Hollywood script. Ignoring their divorce nine months later, of course. 

And her marriage to the playwright Arthur Miller - the Intellectual and the Showgirl! They were sad, yes, because they ended badly, but boy, were they proper Hollywood romances. No Brangelina nonsense for Norma! 

Ah, yes, now we're getting to the real reason she's an icon - Marylin herself. Not only did she ooze sex appeal, something that scandalised Hollywood at the time (oh how times have changed!) but she was graceful and sweet - hell, even one of her most famous characters was called Sugar Kane! And even though her story has the saddest ending, and, despite all her hard work, critics still slated her acting, she is iconic because she embraced the idea of dreams and fantasies, once famously saying 'I have too many fantasies to be a housewife. I guess I am a fantasy.' Because she was. Men wanted her- perhaps not in the way they'd want Grace Kelly, but they wanted her all the same- and all the little girls who wanted to be actresses wanted to be her too, because she was oh-so-beautiful and oh-so-glamourous and oh-so-adored. And in the end, that's all anyone wants to be, isn't it? Adored? 

So that, adorkables, is why I think Marylin Monroe is an icon.