Allan Grant
Marilyn Monroe

THE REVIEW

Fragility, instability, sadness. Infantilism, naivety, innocence. Affliction, despondency, abandonment. Shyness and confusion, perplexity. This is Marilyn two days before dying, portrayed by Allan Grant (1919-2008), photographer for "Life" magazine.

Naked. As I have never seen her before.
Much more naked than in the famous Playboy photo, lying on red satin in a seductive pose, candidly savvy. Light years away from the glossy plastic doll, with lips almost deformed by excessive lipstick, half-closed and dreamy eyes.

Dear Marilyn, Hollywood, the factory of dreams and monstrous creatures molded in its image and likeness, gave you a new life only to slowly destroy it, trapping you in a repugnant game whose rules forced you to embody what you could never be. They plundered your fears, traumas, ambitions, and dreams, your insecurity. They buried your personality under tons of makeup, platinum blonde dyes, greedy sexuality, humor, and vacuity. Not an ethereal and unattainable goddess like Garbo, but the super sexy bombshell. Divine but within everyone's reach, merchandise to be exported on a planetary scale; soft, juicy, and delicious like a peach, ready to be smelled, savored, and devoured. They had lost Jean Harlow too soon and finally came you, like manna from heaven and like her abundant, plebeian, and scandalous, easy and without intellectual complications. And then, him, your husband Arthur: he too tried to change you, to create you in his image and likeness. In vain.

Of you, of your true nature, no one cared in the slightest: you were unacceptable and unpresentable.
Marilyn, muse of all muses, erotic archetype manufactured and forced of the 20th century, loved and immortal, this is how I want to remember you in your last days of earthly life: shattered and high, neurotic, drifting, failed. Real.