Making
Ignorance Chic
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 19,
2010
Casanova’s rule for seduction was to tell a beautiful woman she was intelligent
and an intelligent woman she was beautiful.
The false choice between intellectualism
and sexuality in women has persisted through the ages. There was no more
poignant victim of it than Marilyn Monroe.
She was smart enough to become the most
famous Dumb Blonde in history. Photographers loved to get her to pose in tight
shorts, a silk robe or a swimsuit with a come-hither look and a weighty book — a
history of Goya or James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Heinrich Heine’s poems. A
high-brow bunny picture, a variation on the sexy librarian trope.
Men who were nervous about her erotic intensity
could feel superior by making fun of her intellectually.
Marilyn was not completely in on the joke.
Scarred by her schizophrenic mother and dislocated upbringing, she was happy to
have the classics put in her hand. What’s more, she read some of them, from
Proust to Dostoyevsky to Freud to Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of
Lincoln (given to her by husband Arthur Miller), collecting a library of 400
books.
Miller once called Marilyn “a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a
crowd pulling at her clothes.”
“Fragments,” a new book of her poems,
letters and musings, some written in her childlike hand with misspellings in
leather books and others on stationery from the Waldorf-Astoria and the Beverly
Hills Hotel, is affecting. The world’s most coveted woman, a picture of
luminescence, was lonely and dark. Thinking herself happily married, she was
crushed to discover an open journal in which Miller had written that she
disappointed him and embarrassed him in front of his intellectual peers.
“I guess I have always been deeply
terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love
another, ever, really.”
Her friend Saul Bellow wrote in a letter
that Marilyn “conducts herself like a philosopher.” He observed: “She was
connected with a very powerful current but she couldn’t disconnect herself from
it,” adding: “She had a kind of curious
incandescence under the skin.”
The sad sex symbol is still a candle in the
wind. There’s a hit novel in
Britain
narrated by the Maltese terrier Frank Sinatra gave her, which she named “Maf,”
for Mafia, and three movies in the works about her. Naomi Watts is planning to
star in a biopic based on the novel, “Blonde,” by Joyce Carol Oates; Michelle
Williams is shooting “My Week With Marilyn,” and another movie is planned based
on an account by Lionel Grandison, a former deputy Los Angeles coroner who
claims he was forced to change the star’s death certificate to read suicide
instead of murder.
At least, unlike Paris Hilton and her ilk, the Dumb Blonde of ’50s cinema had a
firm grasp on one thing: It was cool to be smart. She aspired to read good books and
be friends with intellectuals, even going so far as to marry one. But now
another famous beauty with glowing skin and a powerful current, Sarah Palin, has
made ignorance fashionable.
You struggle to name Supreme Court cases, newspapers you read and even founding
fathers you admire? No problem. You endorse a candidate for the Pennsylvania
Senate seat who is the nominee in West Virginia? Oh, well.
At least you’re not one of those
“spineless” elites with an Ivy League education, like President Obama, who can’t
feel anything. It’s news to Christine O’Donnell that the Constitution guarantees
separation of church and state. It’s news to Joe Miller, whose guards handcuffed
a journalist, and to Carl Paladino, who threatened The New York Post’s Fred
Dicker, that the First Amendment exists, even in Tea Party Land. Michele
Bachmann calls Smoot-Hawley Hoot-Smalley.
Sharron Angle sank to new lows of
obliviousness when she told a classroom of Hispanic kids in
Las Vegas:
“Some of you look a little more Asian to me.”
As Palin tweeted in July about her own
special language adding examples from W. and Obama: “ ‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’
‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new
words too. Got to celebrate it!”
On Saturday, at a G.O.P. rally in
Anaheim,
Calif., Palin mockingly noted that you won’t find her invoking Mao or Saul
Alinsky. She says she believes in American exceptionalism. But when it comes to
the people running the country, exceptionalism is suspect; leaders should be —
as Palin, O’Donnell and Angle keep saying — just like you.
In Marilyn’s America, there were aspirations. The studios tackled literary
novels rather than one-liners like “He’s Just Not That Into You” and
navel-gazing drivel like “Eat Pray Love.” Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” paired cartoon
characters with famous composers. Even Bugs Bunny did Wagner.
But in Sarah’s America, we’ve refudiated
all that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/opinion/20dowd.html?ref=maureendowd
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