Marilyn's Immortal Appeal

Maureen Dowd devoted her column to the enduring icon last week, fifty years after Monroe's death:

Wherever I travel in the world, I run across the luminous image of the heartbreaking and breathtaking sex symbol who was smart enough to become the most famous “dumb blonde” of the 20th century. Marilyn, her white pleated halter dress flying up over the New York subway grate, is as deeply etched in the global imagination as Audrey Hepburn in a black Givenchy dress at Tiffany’s.

David Thomson attempts to unravel the mystery surrounding her death, and, come to think of it, her life:

Monroe escaped the real lust of Norman Mailer but reduced the more kindly Arthur Miller to despair; she was a great actress thwarted by an unkind system, or she was a knowing sexpot who worked very hard on her looks and her voice to play the dumb blonde stupid men expected. She longed to play O’Neill or Chekhov, or was she in her element doing Sugar Kane in Some Like It Hot? She was an Actors Studio tragedienne, or she knew that her career lay in movies that made dirty jokes behind her back. Keep all of those scenes, and what does it amount to—the plausible and human possibility that she was a mess who never worked her life out?