On Friday afternoon I went down to the neighborhood theater and watched a movie about Marilyn Monroe. I wasn’t blown away by the movie itself, which is one of many nominated for an Academy Award, but it did get me thinking about fame and fortune. I love money, unapologetically for the most part, but when it comes to fame, I think people who aspire to celebrity are well on their way to complete madness.
This includes presidential hopefuls, people who want to run large corporations, actresses, and little girls from semi-rough neighborhoods in New Jersey whose voices somehow serve as the cornerstone of dreams that are shared by millions.
What I heard on Saturday afternoon wasn’t initially clear to me. I thought the guy on radio was dedicating her most famous song to someone else. A couple of songs later a minister came on the radio program I was listening to and was asked to explain how this death would impact the black community as a whole. Oh, I thought. She died. Wow.
It would have been hard to live through the 1980s and early 1990s without knowing the songs. I never owned any of her music but I heard plenty of it. Some of it I really liked; most of it I did not. I never saw either of her big movies, both of which looked awful enough in previews. I don’t really follow celebrity gossip much, but I had heard the stories about the marriage to a guy whose name was apparently synonymous with thuggery but whom I’d never heard of otherwise. I heard about the drugs and I saw a picture of her on stage in which she looked not unlike an elderly chicken.
I saw, of course, the interview, and yesterday, on Monday (I’m sort of embarrassed to admit this) I spent many hours watching other interviews and reading articles and watching clips from the news programs. Like a student completely unprepared for the exam but dead set on getting an A, I absorbed at a fevered pace. I have many questions and comments, but I’ll close with the one that keeps raising its hand in a demand for attention: Why is everyone so anxious to blame the ex-husband?
