A Brief by Doug Draper (and something a little lighter for a long holiday weekend)
Okay, I admit it. I have this incurable thing for Marilyn.
Earlier this year, I wrote a column mourning my lost chance, 60 years ago this June in Niagara Falls, to have my photo taken with Marilyn Monroe when I was a mere babe of one and she was in the Honeymoon City filming a movie called ‘Niagara’. And now I can’t let this August 5 go by without a mention of the 50th anniversary of her death at age 36.
I still remember coming home after another sweaty day of playing baseball in my Welland, Ontario neighborhood during the summer of ‘62 to learn that Marilyn had been found dead in her home in Los Angeles, California. Monroe was one of the most famous people in the world at that time and news of her passing might only be rivaled by news the following year that the U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated, and news later in the 1960s that Kennedy’s brother Bobby and civil rights leader Martin, Luther King had been cut down by bullets, then the news, a decade later , that former Beatle John Lennon had been cut down.
More recently there was news of the untimely death of Michael Jackson but as much as that captured world-wide headlines at the time, one wonders to what extent he will live on in death as much as Marilyn, who is still written about and reproduced in photographs as if she never left us. Why is it that every celebrity since, from Madonna to more contemporary pop singers like Christina Aguilera and Lady Gaga emulate her yet never quite make the cut? What explains her everlasting mystique?
Maybe some of you may know better than I. All I know is that I am still like the kid in the 23rd row of the theatre in the lyrics Berne Taupin wrote for that Elton John song called ‘Candle in the Wind’, which I think is still one of the finest tribute to her. So let me cut this one off with a few words from that song.
“Goodbye Norma Jean, though I never knew you at all, you had the grace to hold yourself while those around you crawled. They crawled out of the woodwork and they whispered into your brain.They set you on the treadmill and they made you change your name.”
“And it seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind, never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in. And I would have liked to have known you but I was just a kid. Your candle burned out long before your legend ever did.”
Niagara At Large 