In a development that has sent seismic shudders through the chintzy parlours of Tinseltown's nostalgia industry, the centenary of Marilyn Monroe's birth has been marked by a gaudy cavalcade of peroxide wigs, breathy whispers, and the desperate grasping of relevance by a town built on celluloid lies. Lookalike contests, those barometers of cultural vacuity, have sprung up like fungal growths on a damp Hollywood backlot, with contenders wobbling on stilettos and pouting into the abyss, each one a sad, shimmering ghost of a woman who was herself a ghost long before her untimely exit.
But beneath the froth of lip-gloss and white dresses, a rancorous debate rages: what exactly is Monroe's legacy? Is she a feminist icon, a tragic victim of patriarchy's grubby paws, or merely a pin-up for the ages, a blank canvas for projection? The chattering classes, never ones to let a good corpse go unmolested, have been gnawing at this bone with the fervour of starving jackals. Meanwhile, the actual living women who bear an uncanny resemblance to the late star find themselves in a peculiar purgatory, trading on a face that is not their own, a ghostly simulacrum for the amusement of the great unwashed.
One such contestant, a waitress from Bognor Regis who goes by the nom de guerre 'Candyfloss', confided to this correspondent, her voice a tremulous whisper: "It's not about the money, love. It's about... the spirit. She's still here, you know, in the way the light hits a platinum wig." This, dear reader, is the stuff of high farce. The spirit of Marilyn Monroe is presumably too busy haunting Hugh Hefner's pyjamas to bother with a municipal leisure centre in West Sussex.
Yet the debate rages on, a testament to our collective inability to let a good story die. Was she an agent of her own destiny, or a pawn in the games of powerful men? The answer, as ever with such matters, is a splodge of grey in a world desperate for black and white. Marilyn was both and neither, a woman who played the dumb blonde with the cunning of a fox, yet found herself trapped in the very cage she had gilded. Her legacy, if it can be distilled, is the uncomfortable truth that beauty is a currency that devalues in the spending, and that the price of fame is often measured in human misery.
As the lookalikes pout and preen, and the pundits pontificate, one cannot shake the image of Monroe herself, not in her iconic white dress, but alone in her Brentwood home, the phone silent, the pills rattling in their bottle. That, to my gin-soaked mind, is the real centenary tribute: a nation's refusal to look beyond the glitter, a culture that prefers the imitation to the real thing, the cardboard cut-out to the flesh and blood.
And so, as the last lookalike takes her bow, and the final academic treatise on Monroe's feminist significance is filed under 'W' for 'wank', we are left with the lingering question: what do we actually celebrate when we celebrate Marilyn Monroe? We celebrate our own capacity for delusion, for the willing suspension of disbelief, for the desperate need to believe that somewhere, in a better world, the blonde bombshell got her happy ending. But this is not that world. This is a world where a hundred Marilyns wobble on high heels, each one a monument to the tragedy of a woman who never got to be just 'Norma Jeane'.
Cheers to the centenary. The gin is on me.
