They gathered in the drizzle, a dozen identical platinum heads, each one a pale mirror of a ghost. It was not quite the Hollywood Hills, but a grey London square outside the National Portrait Gallery. A hundred years after Norma Jeane Mortenson first opened her eyes, the Marilyn Monroe lookalikes came to pay their respects. And in doing so, they told us something odd and rather wonderful about how we borrow our heroes, and how cultural exports survive the export itself.
Let us be clear: Marilyn Monroe was not British. She was American, through and through – a product of Los Angeles, of the studio system, of the particular kind of loneliness that only fame can breed. And yet, for the past half-century, her image has been partially repatriated. The lookalikes, the impersonators, the drag queens, the students of her particular breathlessness: they are now a fixture of British street culture. At any hen party, at any themed bar, at any Soho nightclub, she is there. She is a mask we wear for a laugh, a tragic icon remade as a camp jester.
So when they called for a celebration of her centenary, I went along to see what the fuss was about. The answer: not much fuss, and that was the point. There was no great spectacle, no marching band. Just women – and a few men – in white dresses, standing still for photographs, shivering slightly. One of them, a woman in her fifties with the patient face of a primary school teacher, told me she had been doing this for thirty years. “Why?” I asked. She laughed. “Because she makes people happy,” she said. “Even now, even here.”
That is the secret of the cultural export. It is not just the thing itself – the film, the photograph, the whispery voice singing ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President’. It is what we do with it afterwards. We take the American dream of Marilyn and we turn it into something else: a symbol of endurance against the odds, a bit of glamour on a grey day, a shared joke that everyone understands.
What struck me most was the silence. These were not performers; they were devotees. They stood in a loose knot, each one alone with their own thoughts. A young woman in a replica of the subway dress held a single white rose. A man in heels and a wig adjusted his seams. They did not speak to each other much. They were not there for community. They were there for a private ritual, performed in public.
Perhaps that is the real legacy. Monroe herself was a paradox: the most public of private people, forever projecting an image that she could not control. Now we do it for her, every day, on streets she never walked. The British version of Marilyn is a strange hybrid: part American glamour, part British irony, part stubborn refusal to let a good thing die. As the crowd began to disperse, the lookalikes walked away in different directions, merging into the lunchtime crowds. For a moment, the city was full of Marilyns. Then you blinked, and they were gone.
Happy birthday, Norma Jeane. You handle the afterlife better than most.
