When you’re famous you… run into human nature in a raw kind of way… It’s nice to be included in people’s fantasies, But you also like to be accepted for your own sake. —Marilyn Monroe IF MARILYN MONROE WERE alive today, she would have been sixty years old on June 1, 1986. This childlike sex goddess in her sixties is itself a shocking notion. If we lived through the years of her fame, it forces us to recognize the passage of time in our own lives. If we know her only as a myth, it makes us realize that she was a human being just as perishable as we are. For all of us, imagining Marilyn as she would be today is hard. Her image was so dependent on a sensuous youthfulness that it was bound to self-destruct. But it would have been much harder for Marilyn. She was terrified of aging. The restriction of her spirit in the airtight prison of beauty was so complete that she literally feared aging more than death itself—not the aging of mind and spirit, which all of us might fear as the loss of our unique selves, but the wrinkling of skin and softening of muscle that changes only the external and most interchangeable part of us.
