The upside of idolising dead people is that you can go through their things. It’s not creepy – you’re an amateur historian, reconstructing the material culture of a lost age. With some luck, the whole pursuit will gain the cachet of a primordial religious ritual. Virtually every major star from Hollywood’s Golden Age is gone, and many of them have since been transmuted into transcendent icons. The things they touch and the places they visit become sacred by proximity. This doesn’t get any clearer than at “Marilyn: The Exhibition”, a rare showing of 250 of the actress’s most intimate possessions at an incongruous venue near London Bridge Station.
There has never been anything like this before in Britain; it provides the kind of thrill that international fans can’t get from reading online auction listings or taking Hollywood pilgrimages on Google Street View. Face creams and eye pencils are displayed like the relics of medieval saints. One sign even announces that bleached hairs were found on some of the objects in storage.
Every phase in Monroe’s life is covered. If you’ve ever wanted to be a fly on the wall in her marriage to Joe DiMaggio, you can get up-close-and-personal with his shaving kit and signed baseball and her monogrammed suitcase from their honeymoon to Japan. “VIP” visitors can gather in groups of six to touch a black velvet belt or an award proclaiming her the “Sweetest Girl in Motion Pictures”, originally presented in 1953 by the Yolo County Fair Sugar Queen. There are even steps up to the display cases carrying her real clothes, so you can stand on equal footing with a risen Marilyn. (Although overcome by the effect, I was reminded of the Lolita passage in which Humbert Humbert finds himself flinging skirts and shorts on to a department-store counter, imagining they are the stepdaughter he is about to abduct).
The curators understand all the morbidities of Hollywood fandom; they get, instinctively, that fans want proximity to Monroe’s last moments. She died of a barbiturate overdose in the bedroom of her newly bought Mediterranean-style home in Brentwood, California. We’re shown detailed floor plans and a copy of the plaque from outside the front door: in a stroke of irony rivalling anything thought up by a Golden Age Hollywood publicist, it reads CURSUM PERFICIO, Latin for “my journey ends here”. The exhibition takes care not to push conspiracy theories, but those who have read the Donald Spoto biography, which implicates Monroe’s housekeeper in the actress’s death, will be spooked by a collection of kitchen utensils – including a particularly sinister-looking melon baller. A prescription for the fatal medication, Phenergan, sits under glass in a spread of items from Monroe’s bedside table. True crime fanatics and Hollywood escapists might have more than a few things in common.
You can be interested in Classic Hollywood in 2024, but this is all an admission that you’re drawn in by its central pillars of gossip, glamour, decadence, sex and death. Those working within saw the attraction: from the fiction of F Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West, both part-time Hollywood screenwriters, we can only understand the industry as a place of sad, terrifying beauty – a monster feeding on occasional blood sacrifices from willing starlets.
The London Marilyn exhibition realises it has created an exciting opportunity for sensationalism, and attempts to cover its own tracks with a tenuous feminist narrative. Monroe becomes an “idol for many women who fight for gender equality” and “a pioneer of the emancipation movement” – both slightly trumped-up statements prompted by her wearing trousers and founding a short-lived production company. We’re briefed about the early 1930s as a relatively liberating period for screen actresses, and even shown a beautifully displayed costume originally worn by Monroe’s childhood idol, Jean Harlow – another witty sex symbol from an age of relatively lax censorship. But the curators ignore the real story here, which, when taken all together, is like something from a Germanic fairy tale. Harlow’s untimely death from liver failure in 1937 seemingly invoked a curse on Hollywood blondes. Few biographers neglect the obvious link to Monroe’s passing; it is also difficult to avoid bringing up Jayne Mansfield, who made a career aping the Marilyn archetype in comedy films and perished in a car crash five years after her predecessor.
One needs no new political justification to worship at the Hollywood altar. Life in the industry was tough for all female stars. Collectors of memorabilia understand better than anyone that this entails valuable narrative interest in and of itself – they spend millions to get physical verification of grooming rituals and predatory contracts. Monroe was surrounded by people who tried to take advantage of her and often succeeded, from studio bosses to possessive acting teachers. Rather than rewrite their stories, it might be more appropriate to think of Marilyn et al as Homeric heroines, controlled from above by a vengeful pantheon and pelted with tragic parallels.
“Marilyn: The Exhibition” is on show at Arches London Bridge until 23 February 2025
[See also: Bob Dylan at the Royal Albert Hall: the best he’s been in years]
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