It’s been said that the movie stars of Hollywood’s golden age were our version of the Greek gods. That’s how much they towered over our imaginations (and still do). Humphrey Bogart was the god of cynical valor, Bette Davis the goddess of tough love, James Stewart the god of aw-shucks decency, and so on. But you might say that Marilyn Monroe stands apart from those stars as much as they stood apart from the rest of us. For the universe endowed Marilyn with a special quality: Before she was anything else, she was our goddess of sex, of bedazzled erotic enchantment. And 100 years after her birth, that’s part of why we’re still obsessed with Marilyn, still trying to pin down who she was and what she meant to us.
Sex, the very lifeblood of that thing we call movies, will always be a force as mysterious as it is primal. And Marilyn, who died in 1962, was on the cusp of the sexual revolution; she was its herald. Just before the age of liberation brought about by the birth-control pill, Marilyn was already a new kind of heightened erotogenic star. The long-dark-lashed eyes that would pop open in a daze of wonder and then half-close, as if caught in a carnal reverie. The smile that was a lipstick bomb of bliss. The cooing, teasing voice of sugary flirtation and seduction. And let’s not forget the sparkly nightclub splendor of those curves.
