Thursday, February 21, 2008

Mischanneling Marilyn

Between them, Lindsay Lohan (21) and Bert Stern (79) have inhabited planet Earth for a century, but all those years have not produced an iota of the good judgment it would have taken for them not to recreate "Marilyn Monroe's Last Sitting" for New York Magazine this week.

Grave-robbing is rife in the celebrity world, but the desperation of a troubled young woman and an aging once-talented photographer plumbs new depths of exploitation. Lohan has none of Marilyn's magic, and Stern is parodying the artist he was 46 years ago.

My revulsion is not objective. As someone who spent a week in 1955 working with Marilyn and the gifted Ed Feingersh, both of whom died in their thirties, as he created classic photographs of her, I am prejudiced in the extreme.

But for anyone who wants to get a sense of what Marilyn Monroe was really like, there is the YouTube presentation of some of Feingersh's pictures here and, for the truly patient, the story of how they were taken here.

Marilyn was no Lindsay Lohan.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the references. I thought the same when I first saw the Lohan slide show.

Norma Jeane, a beautiful person and a quite an actress. Elton John was correct when he sang that her candle burned out long before it should.

He rededicated Candle in the Wind to Diana but he wrote it for Marilyn.

Liza said...

I agree. People should just simply have more respect.