Marilyn Monroe, Death Valley” reads one of the photo captions in the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition about the most famous dead woman in history. The image shows a 19-year-old Monroe, her hair brown and in curls, her nose not yet tweaked through rhinoplasty, ascending a rocky cliff edge for the photographer André de Dienes. In another by De Dienes, taken too in 1945, Monroe sits barefoot in the middle of a desert highway. A vehicle speeds downwind along the next lane, meaning she’s directly in the path of any car hurtling towards her. Or is De Dienes’s camera the car in this scenario? Are we?
It feels a bit on-the-nose, doesn’t it? Death Valley, California. A woman scaling something impenetrable. That same woman grinning prettily in the face of certain doom. If the NPG’s Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait does anything, it demonstrates how remarkably easy Monroe’s life was to narrativise, and how easily a little bit of pop-psychology can be applied to every facet of her existence. Norma Jeane Mortensen became Norma Jeane Baker became Marilyn Monroe, as if each new reinvention would fix what was broken. She never knew her father (his identity was only proven, through DNA testing, in 2022), so called each one of her husbands “Daddy”. Letters to the father of her third husband Arthur Miller, some of which are on display here, show that she called him “Daddy”, too. The Spanish-style bungalow she died in – where she accidentally overdosed, or killed herself, or was killed, depending on whom you believe – had a Latin motto inscribed on a plaque outside the front door: “Cursum perficio”, or “Here ends my journey”. Even Ryan Murphy wouldn’t dare try to get away with that one.
