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BEAUTY MARK: A VERSE NOVEL OF MARILYN MONROE

Page history last edited by RichiesPicks 3 years, 10 months ago

1 June 2020 BEAUTY MARK: A VERSE NOVEL OF MARILYN MONROE by Carole Boston Weatherford, Candlewick, September 2020, 192p., ISBN: 978-1-5362-0629-6

 

“But please don’t tread on dearest Marilyn

Cause she’s not very tough

She should have been made of iron or steel

But she was only made of flesh and blood”

-- The Kinks, “Celluloid Heroes (1972)

 

“Men grow cold as girls grow old

And we all lose our charms in the end

But square cut or pear shaped

These rocks don’t lose their shape

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend”

-- composed by Jule Styne and Leo Robin; performed by Marilyn Monroe in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953)

 

“The Meaning of Mama

 

Don’t call me Mama,

said Ida Bolender, my foster mother,

explaining that we were not kin.

You’re old enough to know better.

You just board here, she said,

adding that my mother would be visiting the next day.

Call her Mama if you want.

 

Gladys never kissed me

or held me or had much to say to me,

but I obeyed my foster mother.

Hello, Mama, I said.

Gladys just stared.

At least I knew who she was.

 

When I visited the rooming house 

where she lived, I hid in the closet for hours.

Frightened.

As I lay in bed at night turning the pages of a book,

she’d say, Don’t make so much noise, Norma.

The sound made her nervous.

 

Mama had plenty to grieve about.

Her father and grandmother both died

in mental hospitals, and her brother

killed himself. Her unhappy childhood ended

at age fifteen when she married a man twelve years older.

She had two children by Jasper Baker

and two concussions at his hand

before coming home early from work

and catching him in bed with another woman.

 

None of the silent negatives she spliced

as a film cutter for a movie studio

prepared Gladys for the scene that day

or for the fallout.

After a big fight, Jasper left Gladys--

but not for good, not without the children.

Mama was so down that she didn’t see him

sneak back and kidnap her two babies.

She spent many months and all her savings

on a hunt that led to Kentucky.

She hitchhiked there.

Jasper had a new wife and a fine home.

And her children had a shot at happiness.

Mama didn’t have the heart to face them,

believing they were better off without her.

By the time I was born, she was claiming 

that her two older children were dead.

She practiced the lie so often,

she may have come to believe it.”

 

The truth of Marilyn Monroe’s formative years is every bit as upsetting as the grittiest made-up stories in today’s YA novels. BEAUTY MARK, Carole Boston Weatherford’s revealing verse novel about the life and death of Marilyn Monroe, is a stunning tribute to the legendary American icon and a tasty teen-sized slice of American cultural history. 

 

As the result of mental health issues suffered by Marilyn’s mother and grandmother, the future film star was lucky to survive her infancy and childhood. She never met her father. With her mother eventually institutionalized, Norma Jean Mortenson (as her birth certificate read) grew up being bounced around between foster homes, orphanages, friends, and relatives. Her first marriage at sixteen helped her escape one horrific situation, and landed her in an equally-bad one. Five years later, she was divorced and on the road to immortality.

 

“The camera loved me and I loved it back.

All my life, I had been an outsider, an orphan. 

For the first time, I realized where I belonged

and who I belonged to: the public.”

 

Marilyn straightened and bleached her hair as she embarked on a modeling career and by the time she was twenty, she was working in films.  A few years later in the early 1950s, she hit it big in Hollywood, but after two more marriages and a decade of stardom, she took her own life.

 

Why would twenty-first century adolescents be interested in this very hot, very problematic actress who hit her peak back in the Eisenhower years? I suggest encouraging them to watch one of her movies. After reading BEAUTY MARK, I certainly needed to see one of them.

 

I hadn’t seen any Marilyn Monroe films in nearly fifty years, back in the days when Elton John rhapsodized about her in “Candle in the Wind.” I located the 1959 black-and-white comedy “Some Like it Hot” available on demand, and fired up a batch of popcorn. It’s the film for which Marilyn won a Golden Globe, and which the American Film Institute ranks as the 14th greatest American movie of all time. My reaction? The combination of her sexiness, comedic talent, and vulnerability shine through just as strongly today as they did then. 

 

There’s a lot of pain packed into this phenomenal, YA verse-novel biography. Thanks to this absorbing verse novel, I now see the late screen actress as far more than a legend and a pretty face.

 

Richie Partington, MLIS

Richie's Pickshttp://richiespicks.pbworks.com

https://www.facebook.com/richiespicks/

richiepartington@gmail.com  

 

 

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